US Patent and Trademark Office

US Patent and Trademark Office issued patents to inventors which give them the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling their invention in the United States. In exchange for this grant, the inventors must disclose their invention to the public in the form of a patent application. A patent does not grant inventors the right to make, use, sell, or import their inventions. But this does exclude others from doing so.

Patents are issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office to any person who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement to an already patented invention. Practically anything made by humans, subject to the conditions and requirements of the law, is patentable. A patent is granted by US Patent and Trademark Office upon the invention, not upon merely the idea or suggestion of a new invention.

The job to determine the patentability of an invention fell on the shoulders of the US Patent and Trademark Office examiner. After the patent application has been filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office, the examiner carefully reviews the application in order to determine the invention's patentability. There is only one US Patent and Trademark Office in the U.S. It is located in Arlington, Virginia, close to Washington, DC.

The US Patent and Trademark Office will not tell you if your invention has already been invented by someone else unless you apply for a patent. US Patent and Trademark Office can only verify that the description and claims per description by their inventors or patent attorneys, are new, unique, and not obvious to the US Patent and Trademark Office. The US Patent and Trademark Office examiners do not verify that an invention works or that it can ever be, or never has been, built. They try only to correctly verify that the invention is patentable and has not been patented in the U.S. before.

There are three types of U.S. patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office which are: utility patents, design patents and plant patents. To be patentable, an invention essentially must meet the following requirements set by US Patent and Trademark Office which are: (1) useful, (2) novel, and (3) non-obvious. The novelty requirement of US Patent and Trademark Office is often consider the entry test for patentability. The probably more demanding, non-obviousness requirement is harder to objectively define. The typical way that an examiner in US Patent and Trademark Office shows obviousness is to cite a number of prior art references that, when combined as suggested by possibly another prior art reference, contain all of the elements of the applicant's invention.

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