Re-Inventing The Wheel

I often have to explain to clients how the patent claim system works. I’ve found this illustration useful and I hope that you will too.

Suppose you had invented a bicycle wheel like the one shown here.

However you had never seen another wheel and therefore in your claims you described the wheel concept itself as your invention, hoping to own all kinds of wheels.

However, in a prior art search like we perform at BML, one of the first patents we uncovered was a wheel like this one.

Okay—you cant own the wheel, but this wheel has no spokes, rim or tires. Perhaps we can change our claims to a spoked wheel with a tire.

 

Unfortunately, the next patent turned up by the search is a spoked wheel like the one below. However this wheel has no tire. It has a metal rim.

Now we are down to looking for a wheel that has a tire on it.  Like the next piece of prior art we found


.

 

This patent looks really close. But it has a hard rubber tire. So in the end we are left  with a patent on a baloon tire.  This is what a patent search does.  It helps you refine the claims to  cover only what you have invented that  is novel. 

If you were to submit your patent application with the broader claims you would have suffered successive rejections by the patent office.  Each rejection costing you in time and money to respond to "office actions".

That is the value of a good  patent search.  It saves you time and money by making sure your patent is  something that  meets the patent ability crieria and can be defended  in an office action.