[TowerTalk] Patentability (OT)

[Dick Green]

>> I wrote:

>> BTW, the process is *very* expensive. It costs about $20,000 for each
U.S.
>> patent (mostly attorney's fees), and as much as $200,000 more to broadly
>> protect the invention internationally (mostly translation fees and more
>> attorney's fees.)

> W8JI wrote:

> You're getting ripped off, unless the patent is in some other class
> than the area we are discussing. The typical cost is much less
> than $5k for nuisance-type patent where you don't really care if it is
> prior art or not but mainly want to use it to discourage others from
> having a similar product in a low profit low use application.

> And W8AC wrote:

> Not for the majority of patents.  Patents that derive from the genetic and
> chemical engineering disciplines can be this expensive and these high
costs
> are oftentimes attributed to the attorney's work in narrowing or
broadening
> the scope of the claims in order to circumvent interference issues.   And
> more often than not, a patent attorney will out-source the prior art
search
> since international patents must also be searched.

Just to clear the air, I was referring to the fees for real patents that
have significant economic value, not nuisance patents. I admit that I don't
have any experience with the latter. I believe I mentioned in my post that
my company is developing Internet voting technology. The cryptographic
protocols that can make it safe to vote on the Internet involve theoretical
math and computational techniques that are at the leading edge of the art
(the guy who solved Fermat's Last Theorum isn't the only mathematician who
plays with elliptic curves!) This isn't a simple e-commerce security problem
that can be solved with well-known encryption algorithms. Theoreticians and
cryptographers have been trying to come up with a feasible approach to
online voting for almost 20 years. Obviously, it's worth paying quite a bit
to patent attorneys to make sure that our solution doesn't infringe on
existing  patents, isn't based solely on prior art, isn't obvious, and is
well protected throughout the world. The IP might become the core of a new
multi-billion dollar industry, so it's not like some nuisance patent for the
tiny ham radio antenna market.

73, Dick WC1M


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