What Happens After You File a Patent Application? A General Overview of the Patenting Process. When you file a patent application, the first correspondence you may receive from the Inventor Ideas and Trademark Office will most likely be a type of acknowledgement of the receipt of your application. If you filed your application online, you may get an electronic acknowledgement. If you filed your application by mail, you may get an acknowledgement either in the form of a stamp on a postcard you included (if you included one) or perhaps a filing receipt.
All of these forms of acknowledgement will typically list your filing date, your title of your invention, as well as your application serial number, assuming you met the requirements to obtain a filing date. There are situations if the USPTO will refuse to grant a serial number as well as a filing date, which can be not discussed in the following paragraphs. For those who have met the minimum requirements to obtain a filing date however you missed a number of the other requirements that do not affect your eligibility to obtain a filing date, the US Patent and Trademark Office may send you a Notice to File Missing Parts and give you 3 months to supply the missing parts. As an example, in the event you did not incorporate a declaration of inventorship or perhaps a compliant set of drawings, you have to provide the missing parts inside the given deadline. Otherwise, your application will likely be abandoned.
Your application will likely be assigned to a form of art unit based on the category your invention is classified as well as being an examiner in that art unit. For the way busy that art unit is, it may take about 2 to 3 years before you hear again from an examiner. Generally, your filing fee is simply great for one set of invention to be examined through the USPTO. In the event the examiner finds multiple inventions being claimed, the examiner may send you a restriction requirement. The examiner will group your claims inside the restriction requirement, and you must elect one group that you might want the USPTO to examine whether or not or otherwise not you object to the Inventhelp Invention News. You can pursue the non-elected teams of claims in a divisional application, which can be filed at a later time.
After the examiner reviews your application for patentability, the examiner’s decision is usually reported over a correspondence called an “office action.” Generally, you have three months to answer a business office action. You can extend this deadline by three months thereby enabling you a total of half a year to react, but you have to submit extension fees with your response. A workplace action may indicate that this claims are either rejected or allowed.
Claims may be rejected under 35 USC 112 to be indefinite. This usually signifies that there is an ambiguity in how the invention is claimed, which can typically be fixed by amending or revising the language of the claims. Claims may additionally be rejected under 35 USC 102 to be anticipated by prior art, or under 35 USC 103 to be obvious in light of any prior art or a mixture of multiple prior art references. These rejections can typically be responded to by pointing out a minumum of one distinction between the invention and prior art. In the event the distinction is not inside the claimed invention, then your claims may need to be revised or amended.
The application form goes through another round of examination. The examiner may issue your final rejection or permit the claims. Once more, you have three months to answer a business office action. You can extend this deadline by three months thereby enabling you a total of half a year to react, but you have to submit extension fees with your response. You may attempt to submit a response early enough to get an advisory opinion whether your response would overcome the rejection. Different ways of answering your final rejection may include filing a request continued examination or filing an appeal. A telephonic interview with the examiner may be a very practical and useful strategy to rkplig rejections in some cases.
Once you have overcome the rejections, a notice of allowance is usually issued. You will then be given a deadline to pay the issue fee. After the issue fee is paid, you happen to be granted a patented, and Should I Use Inventhelp To Bring My Invention To Life? will likely be mailed to you. For utility patents, you have to pay maintenance fees at 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years right after the issuance of the patent. There are no maintenance fees for design patents.