Video Transcript

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The name of the game is the claims when you’re dealing with patents. The only thing that matters in court, or in terms of the patent’s value, are the claims that get issued.

So here’s how you read a patent. If you want to know how to build the thing that’s described in the patent, you read the whole thing. If you want to know what’s protected by the patent, you only read the claims.

People commonly make the mistake of reading the abstract or the specification or other parts of the patent and saying, “I can’t believe the patent office gave this guy a patent on this thing — that’s so obvious!” But when you read through to the claims, you may well find that it wasn’t obvious at all. The thing that they claimed — they just described some obvious things in the patent application, which, by the way, you should do as part of discussing the background that led you to the invention. Till next time!