Patent Law Attorney - Southern California

Intellectual property can be a key asset of many businesses. Whether your business is a technology based business, or a consumer product, intellectual property can be valuable. It is important to invest in the protection of your company’s intellectual property. A failure to police and defend your intellectual property rights may result in a loss of those rights. If you need help protecting your Intellectual Property please call the law firm of Gaston & Gaston at 649-398-1882 today.

Patent Law

Patents can protect useful objects or designs. They may also protect certain business methods or processes. In order to receive patent protection, the invention must be sufficiently novel. To determine whether an invention is sufficiently novel, a prior art search must be undertaken. Patents are a right limited by field, time and geography.

A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to an inventor or his assignee for a fixed period of time in exchange for a disclosure of an invention.

A patent application must include one or more claims defining the invention which must be new, inventive, and useful or industrially applicable. The exclusive right granted to a patentee in most countries is the right to prevent or exclude others from making, using, selling, offering to sell or importing the invention.

A patent holder must file for protection in each jurisdiction in which he or she wishes to receive patent protection. Filing for international patent protection must be done country by country, for the most part. Therefore, it is wise to perform a market analysis of the various jurisdictions and cost benefit analysis before seeking patent protection in multiple countries. Filing for patents in foreign countries can be complex and costly. Patents are granted for a period of years after which extensions may be granted. A patent gives the holder a monopoly or the exclusive right to the practice of the patent for that period. Anyone else desiring to practice the covered patent must do so under license from the patent holder. Practicing the patent without such a license constitutes infringement of the patent. Once a patent is granted by a jurisdiction’s patent office, certain maintenance work is required to maintaining the patent rights in the jurisdiction. Failure to adequately track, manage and maintain a portfolio can therefore result in an inadvertent loss of patent rights.

Patents are generally enforced through civil lawsuits. Some international jurisdictions have criminal penalties for wanton infringement. Typically, the patent owner will seek monetary compensation for past infringement, and will seek an injunction prohibiting the defendant from engaging in future acts of infringement. To prove infringement, the patent owner must establish that the accused infringer practices all of the requirements of at least one of the claims of the patent.

Accused infringers have the right to challenge the validity of the patent they are accused of infringing. Civil courts hearing patent cases can and often do declare patents invalid. The grounds on which a patent can be found invalid are governed by the law of the jurisdiction.

Most patent rights issues, however, are not resolved through litigation. Typically, patent rights issues are resolved privately through patent licensing. Patent licensing agreements are specialized contracts in which the patent owner (the licensor) agrees not to sue the licensee for infringement of the licensor's patent rights, usually in return for a royalty or other forms of payment. Companies engaged in complex technical fields often enter into multiple license agreements for the production of a single product. Moreover, it is also common for competitors to license patents to each other under cross-licensing agreements in order to gain access to each other's patent rights.

For assistance with protecting or licensing a patent, contact the law firm of Gaston & Gaston at 619-398-1882 today.

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