Video Transcript

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Welcome to The Innovation Cafe with your friendly neighborhood inventor, Gary Schuster. Today we’re going to do a really quick definition: what is a utility patent application?

A utility patent application is a real patent application in the sense that it can mature into an actual patent. A provisional patent application cannot do that. So if you’re in the US, your utility application is the real application that you’re hoping to see become a patent.

It’s for things that meet this test: it’s got to be useful, and pretty much everything’s useful unless it’s illegal. It’s got to not be obvious, meaning that combining stuff that other people did in the past doesn’t render it obvious. It has to be novel, meaning no one exactly did the same thing, even if they didn’t recognize what they were doing. It can’t have been done exactly before.

It has to be described in a way that proves to the patent examiner that you have the invention tackled — you understand it, you know how to make it work, you’ve described enough that someone in the field could recreate it. And it has to have claims, which are the legal boundaries of what you’re protecting.

A utility patent application is the workhorse of the patent system. It’s how most inventions get protected. If you’ve got something new and useful, this is the path you want to be on.