Video Transcript

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Welcome to Innovation Cafe. I’m Gary Schuster, and I want to talk with you briefly about provisional patent applications.

What’s a provisional patent application? Well, it’s a document that you file with the US Patent and Trademark Office, and it gives you the right to say that your patent is pending for up to one year. During that year, you can test the market, you can show it to people, you can try to get funding — you can do whatever you want to do.

If you decide to go forward with a full patent application, you can use the provisional as the basis for it. The best part is it’s relatively inexpensive and it’s relatively easy to file.

So if you have an invention and you want to get some protection on it quickly and cheaply, a provisional patent application is the way to go.