Nice article Tony! I dealt with a few patent searches and learned very quickly you had to have deep pockets and a very fast business plan to even have a chance at making any money. That said, coders have it made because their program code falls under copyright mostly. Hardly any cost and a super long runway. No one saw that coming.
This is a nice summary (and I learned a couple of new things too!) I too very briefly flirted with the idea of patent law, before abandoning it (for many of the same reasons you did).
A few other things that I emphasize to non-industrial scientists (and others) are that (a) you can get a patent on basically anything, but it might be so narrow to be useless; that (b) patents are not papers, they are instead legal documents that can be used as business tools (even if some of their sections resemble parts of a scientific paper); and related to that, (c) patents are not necessarily "units of innovation" even though it may be tempting to count and value them as such.
Nice article Tony! I dealt with a few patent searches and learned very quickly you had to have deep pockets and a very fast business plan to even have a chance at making any money. That said, coders have it made because their program code falls under copyright mostly. Hardly any cost and a super long runway. No one saw that coming.
Thanks, Tony! Great summary of an often-obscure area!
This is a nice summary (and I learned a couple of new things too!) I too very briefly flirted with the idea of patent law, before abandoning it (for many of the same reasons you did).
A few other things that I emphasize to non-industrial scientists (and others) are that (a) you can get a patent on basically anything, but it might be so narrow to be useless; that (b) patents are not papers, they are instead legal documents that can be used as business tools (even if some of their sections resemble parts of a scientific paper); and related to that, (c) patents are not necessarily "units of innovation" even though it may be tempting to count and value them as such.
yes, yes, and yes
# of patents is like # of PhDs on staff. Means nothing, brings in no new sales, but looks sleek on an investor deck