0:00:00 - (Doug Jenkins): Coming up next on chamber Amplified, we're.
0:00:02 - (Jake Ward): Ultimately trying to convince the government that you deserve this limited right, this right to exclude others from making, using, selling or importing for a period of time. And that's the power behind the patent, is to have that ability to prevent your competition from competing with you.
0:00:20 - (Doug Jenkins): Welcome to the show. I'm Doug Jenkins from the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce. On each episode of Chamber Amplified, we're examining issues impacting the local business community from employee recruitment and retention, marketing, it issues. It's really anything that can impact your business. Our goal is to give our members tips each week on at least one way they can improve operations and thrive in the current business environment.
0:00:42 - (Doug Jenkins): Well, if you run a business, one of the most important things you can do for it is protect your intellectual property. So if you have a good idea, a good brand, something, you need to make money off of it, right? And you need to have the ability to license it out to some degree if you want to do that. Sometimes that can mean a trademark. Other times that means patent. Today on the podcast, I'm joined by Jake Ward of the ward law office.
0:01:03 - (Doug Jenkins): Talk about the patent side of things. We'll delve into what the difference between patents and trademarks are, when you should get a patent, and a little bit about that patent process. And here's a spoiler of sorts. Prepare for rejection in this process, and then prepare to learn why just getting rejected doesn't mean that's the end of the line and getting a patent, it's kind of long and complicated. We're gonna break it down for you as best we can.
0:01:25 - (Doug Jenkins): Thanks again for tuning in. Remember, if you're listening on Apple podcasts or Spotify, you can rate and review the show. It really does help spread the word. Now let's get into it. So this is an interesting topic in a lot of different regards. Jake, we've got a lot of entrepreneurs in the area, and I would have to imagine that that means that there are some ideas that are worth patenting around here.
0:01:47 - (Doug Jenkins): What's been your experience of working with entrepreneurs and some of the things that you see them patent?
0:01:53 - (Jake Ward): No. It really is amazing how much entrepreneurship, how much creativity we have. Just even in our region, you know, here in northwest Ohio, there are not only a lot of established businesses out there, right? Large companies, even, that have whole teams of engineers that are constantly sort of inventing and creating. But there's a lot of garage inventors still out there. Believe it or not, I've met so many people in their shops or in their garages or wherever they're working on a project.
0:02:28 - (Jake Ward): I think it's a little bit of a testament to that working, you know, sort of base that we have here. People are creative. People are really good at solving problems, and. Yeah, and so a lot of. A lot of inventing, you know, in this area.
0:02:42 - (Doug Jenkins): It's quite the coincidence we're having this conversation today. I was at a business earlier today, and they were talking about a patent they had, and one of the things they. And what they had to do to go through it, and, well, it was quite the process for them, as they alluded to. I'm sure you can attest to that. But that probably spells out why, if you do have a good idea or just have something scribbled down on a napkin, it's worth going through an advisor to go through that patent process, because it's pretty.
0:03:09 - (Doug Jenkins): It's a pretty rigorous process to try it on your own.
0:03:11 - (Jake Ward): There's a reason people like me have a job. I mean, this is not easy, the patent process. It is lengthy. It's complicated. It's rarely straightforward. It's full of all this sort of shocking and scary legal language, like rejection and certain stages. The process are called final. But as I tell my clients, you're never really rejected. It just means that in the process of vetting ideas to decide whether or not your invention deserves a patent, they're going to cite other patents that they think are close. And when you get these rejections, you just sort of step in. That's our job. That's our role, to be an advocate and try to educate and explain. The judge at the patent office, they're called examiners.
0:03:56 - (Jake Ward): Why you're different and better than what they find. And again, nothing's even ever really final. There's just different stages of the process. Final just simply means, well, you're gonna have to pay the government just a little bit more to move it on to the next step. But it's not final until the inventor, you, as the entrepreneur, say it is final, but it is a lengthy process, as the company you talked to earlier today could probably test.
0:04:20 - (Jake Ward): It takes years, about three years on average, between beginning and end, to secure a patent.
0:04:27 - (Doug Jenkins): I'm certainly one for streamlining processes and making them a little bit more accessible. But I would imagine in the world of patents, because of what you're dealing with, because you're trying to protect inventors and the people who are putting this together, there does need to be a degree of difficulty to it, just to make sure that everything is aligned, that it's unchallengeable, that type of thing.
0:04:47 - (Doug Jenkins): There's a lot of rigamaro that probably is necessary. Here it is.
0:04:52 - (Jake Ward): And when most inventors first enter the process and they hear you're likely to be rejected, it's a bit shocking. But when you stop and think about it, it does make some sense, like you're alluding to. I mean, patents are like property, you know, and property has value and inherent value associated with. It's not too different, really, than. Than your car or the house or the building that you're in. There's going to be a value associated with it. And if all you had to do was pay a fee and get a rubber stamp, well, then anybody would be able to get a patent and it would drive the value of the way down. So the fact that they make you sort of jump through these hoops and prove, you know, that you do actually meet these legal standards to secure a patent, and the fact that it's not easy to get do that increases the value of them significantly, and therefore the business value and the reason to secure a patent.
0:05:47 - (Doug Jenkins): So, like you said, there's a lot of different entrepreneurs, a lot of inventors in the area. What are some of the things that people maybe don't realize they should probably go get a patent for if they're working on it. And conversely, what are some things that you don't actually need a patent for or convert? Can't get a. Can't get a patent for because you not allowed to patent something?
0:06:06 - (Jake Ward): You know, that's a loaded question.
0:06:08 - (Doug Jenkins): There's a lot.
0:06:08 - (Jake Ward): It is.
0:06:09 - (Doug Jenkins): We'll break it down.
0:06:11 - (Jake Ward): I teach patent law and patent practice at the University of Toledo College of Law, and I have a regular speaking circuit. And one of my presentations that I give is, actually, you don't need a patent if. And so I'm going to start there, because a lot of times I ask.
0:06:26 - (Doug Jenkins): Seven questions all at once. That's.
0:06:28 - (Jake Ward): No, no, it's great, because there's more than one type of intellectual property, property. And a lot of times, companies, entrepreneurs that are new to it, their minds automatically go to patents because that's what they hear on tv, on shark Tank, and all of that. But not every business needs a patent or even wants a patent. Every business has intellectual property in one form or another, though, for instance, I always make the example of your name, your brand.
0:06:57 - (Jake Ward): That's something we call a trademark. So most businesses have trademarks even if they're selling conventional products, right. That can't be patented because they're not new. You're going to have a certain sort of recognition in the market through your advertising. We call it goodwill that you've developed over time. So trademarks can be something that you can look at even if your product isn't patentable.
0:07:21 - (Jake Ward): You know, copyrights, the creative expression. Right? I mean, most classically written works, like books, right? You go to the. You go to your local library. Everything in there has a copyright notice on it, right. Because it's been written, there's creativity. And so copyright can. Can be useful, too. And it's more than just written works, obviously. It's movies, film, photographs, music. Right. Anything that has at least a tiny bit of creativity associated with it, you know? So, you know, when you ask the question of what types of products, though, might be patents or patentable, we're talking generally about machines, articles of manufacture, something that's been built, compositions, chemical compositions, you know, again, I've, you know, worked in Findlay for years as a tire chemist, and we had lots and lots of rubber formulations, right?
0:08:17 - (Jake Ward): And those are chemical compositions that can be patented and then what we also call methods and methods. It's a pretty broad category, but not only methods of making things, but methods of using them. And that even can be extended into computer implemented methods, you know? So the process of this app running on your phone, right, if it's doing something fairly new or unique, and that is really the touchstone, that's what I want to get to, is in order for that product to be patentable, it has to meet basic standards.
0:08:47 - (Jake Ward): Three, is it new, is it useful? And is it non obvious? And we could talk for hours on each one of those. But really, what I tell most inventors to focus on initially is, has what I. Has, what I developed, is it. Is it really new? Is it different in some way, shape, or form from everything that was known previously? And if you can answer that question with a guess, well, then you're one step along that path to maybe seeking a patent on it.
0:09:14 - (Doug Jenkins): Yeah, I'm going to make a Simpsons reference here. I don't know if you're a Simpsons fan or not.
0:09:18 - (Jake Ward): Oh, yeah.
0:09:18 - (Doug Jenkins): There was an episode a long time ago. I don't. Back when I actually used to watch the show where Homer's brother was trying to invent the baby monitor that could actually decode what the baby was saying. And Homer's advice to his brother was like, I don't know. Well, it just takes something people already have and put a clock in it or something.
0:09:36 - (Jake Ward): Yeah.
0:09:37 - (Doug Jenkins): You wouldn't be able to patent whatever it was just by putting a clock in it at that, because it's not necessarily new. Well, or possibly.
0:09:45 - (Jake Ward): I'll give you the good lawyer answer. It depends. Right. And this is why I'm saying this is because inventions, when we think about it, at its most basic, it's just a solution to a problem, right? That's all inventing is. In which case, I mean, every day, we're all inventing, right? But to be patentable, that solution has to meet those. Those additional legal standards. So if you can say, well, by adding a clock to that particular device, it solved a particular problem, right. That was maybe not apparent to anybody else, or there's some sort of long felt but unsolved need. And. And you recognize, well, by adding some form of timer to it that maybe hits a switch when it gets to a certain time and turns the device on or off or adjusting.
0:10:30 - (Jake Ward): And that solves a particular problem. Well, then, yeah. That adding that clock could be all that was needed in order to make it patentable. So that's why I think you look at your inventing your products. Did you solve a particular problem in a unique way, a unique technical way? Typically. And if the answer is yes, well, you may maybe onto something that could be patented.
0:10:53 - (Doug Jenkins): I think that's the first Simpsons reference that I've made on the podcast, and we're about 115 episodes into this. So if you took the over on betting on that, then you're a winner here. So. But to that regard, that's probably why there's a patent for certain types of coffee maker and then a separate patent for a coffee maker with the timer that gets it ready for you in the morning, if you load it at night.
0:11:15 - (Jake Ward): That's right. They solve different problems. Right. And a lot of times, too. I mean, if we want to get really, really sort of abstract here with all this, I mean, there's a reason we have a patent system. I mean, first and foremost, it's in the constitution. So us patent attorneys have big heads. We get the us constitutional nod, right, where we think of ourselves as being important. But beyond that, you know, this whole process of allowing inventors, individuals, you know, to claim their ideas as being their own and to be able to profit off of them.
0:11:48 - (Jake Ward): You know, if you look back in human history, over the past couple years, technology has done one of these, and the. And the patent system is actually a huge component of that. It encourages that sort of creativity that does those design arounds. Just because someone patented, you know, the coffee maker. Right. That heats in this particular way, maybe they didn't solve the problem of how do you stop it from heating to the point that it burns the coffee. Right.
0:12:14 - (Jake Ward): And there's a particular solution to that. And you can absolutely see how, you know, inventions and different solutions can be lead to additional inventing. And the patent process encourages all that memorializes it. It encourages the progress of science and the useful art.
0:12:31 - (Doug Jenkins): I was going to say, in that way, it's a little like scientific papers or research papers where most of them cite, sort of cite the results of other papers that come from them and then draw some other conclusions based on something else that they add to it. But in, like in the academic world, that's all peer reviewed in this world is. Yeah, world. It just has to go through the patent office, I guess.
0:12:52 - (Jake Ward): That's right.
0:12:52 - (Doug Jenkins): Reviewer. In this, this instance, you have one judge.
0:12:55 - (Jake Ward): You have one judge called the patent examiner, right. And. And they will reject you. Like I said, they will refuse applications for various reasons. You know, if they don't think it's new or if they don't think it works. You know, one of the classic sort of examples is the perpetual motion machine. And so if you come to the patent office with a perpetual motion machine, they're going to want to see a.
0:13:16 - (Doug Jenkins): Working project get ready for.
0:13:17 - (Jake Ward): That's right. So there is a, there is a vetting process. It's not entirely peer reviewed, but that's also not the point of the patent process. Right. The only other comment I can sort of make there about the documents themselves being like scientific papers, in many ways they are, but they're also supposed to be persuasive documents. We're ultimately trying to convince the government that you deserve this limited right, this right to exclude others from making, using, selling or importing for a period of time.
0:13:47 - (Jake Ward): And that's the power behind the patent, is to have that ability to prevent your competition from competing with you. And either you're manufacturing it and you're sort of fencing out the competition, or you're making money by licensing or renting your technology to others in exchange for a royalty agreement. And it's all about that right to exclude that you get with the patent.
0:14:08 - (Doug Jenkins): That's an interesting point, because I think that a lot of times, if you're trying to go this on your own, if you're the inventor, you're probably, and you have that engineering mindset. At the very least, even if you're not an engineer, you're almost talking about something that's almost like selling it to the patent office to be like, here's why it should be patent. That's why you need a professional with that skill set to go through that process. Like, here's how we're going to sell this to the patent office, that it deserves that patent number.
0:14:35 - (Jake Ward): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it goes back to what I was saying a little bit ago, Doug, about solutions to problems. If you can't come to me and say, what problem you solved by this, it probably isn't patentable. I mean, if all you did was, you know, shift the color on this from being, you know, red to green, and even though maybe it's never been green before, so it's new, and people like it, you know, because new things are exciting, and they. And you're able to sell more of it.
0:15:01 - (Jake Ward): I mean, really, it was a. It was a change in color, right. I mean, that's probably something that doesn't rise to the level of being patentable, you know? So. Yeah, so it goes back to, you know, you're not only telling the public how to make and use it, because ultimately, the public gets to benefit from the patent once the patent expires, falls into what we call public domain. But in addition to providing that technical description, you need to tell your judge, the government, why it's important, why. Why this matters in some sort of real world way.
0:15:31 - (Doug Jenkins): So we've all heard the tale of Alexander Graham Bell patenting, getting to the patent office first before his rival and to get the telephone. That's, I don't know how accurate that is or not. If you're working in a field where people are trying to develop a lot of things, I would you see where it's like, oh, man, we just barely beat the competition to the punch on this. Or is it, is that not something that happens that often?
0:15:58 - (Jake Ward): It actually happens more often than really. Right. And it's because we're all sort of in the same, you know, sort of soup of ideas and media, and we're all being exposed to all these ideas all at the same time. And. And the chances are that if you've come up with a really neat idea, there's somebody else out there who also has that same really neat idea, and it creates a bit of a race, honestly. There's a race to the patent office because, you know, you go back in time, it used to matter who invented first.
0:16:26 - (Jake Ward): The law hasn't been that way for. For quite some time now. It is a. We are a first inventor to file country, which matter. So what matters is, what's the date stamp? Okay, how soon did. How soon did you get to the doorstep of the patent office with this idea? And if you're first in line, well, then you're going to prevail over someone who was a day later even that, even if they had the idea before you.
0:16:49 - (Jake Ward): So absolutely. I mean, it does happen. You know, I'll make one other pitch, too. I mean, you brought up the Alexander Graham Bell, but one other pitch for using a professional, the Wright brothers. Another sort of famous, famous inventor. Ohio. The Wright brothers first patent application on the airplane technology. It was in fact rejected by the patent office. They actually had to go to a patent attorney then.
0:17:19 - (Jake Ward): Who? Terry Touman was his name, famous ish patent attorney, the only patent attorney I'm actually aware of who has a statue of him in his hometown. And he was successful then in securing the patent for the Wright brothers after their initial application had been rejected. Again, it goes back to what we were saying, tying this all up, right, to what we were saying at the beginning of the podcast. You know, this is, it's not easy. It's, it's complicated. These are valuable rights, and it's not something you want to do haphazardly. So, you know, generally it is a good idea to seek the help of a professional, someone who's familiar with how the process works.
0:18:02 - (Doug Jenkins): Most definitely. So, Jake, from there, if somebody wants to get in touch with you to maybe talk about what they're thinking about patenting or just start that process, what's the best way to touch base?
0:18:11 - (Jake Ward): Yeah, they reach out by email or phone. Our email address, legalardpatent.com. straightforward. You can also email me directly at jake, jakeardpatent.com. wardpatent.com is the website and 419-408-5500 is our, is our phone number, if anyone's interested. A nice Findlaynumber there for you, actually. And we were happy to chat with people. We don't charge for basic consults. I mean, one of the things about our firm, we are what's called a boutique IP firm. We are, we're not large.
0:18:51 - (Jake Ward): We don't have the overhead of, you know, some firms in larger cities, and we actually pass that savings across to our clients. So we don't charge for those basic consults precisely because, you know, the process is complicated and we want people to be on the right path and feel comfortable asking questions without thinking they're going to get a bill for every, every six minute increment.
0:19:13 - (Doug Jenkins): So we appreciate not charging us billable hours for this conversation, too.
0:19:18 - (Jake Ward): No, we're happy to help. And I also say though, and of course now if you start calling me every day for a week, well, you should expect to get an invoice.
0:19:27 - (Doug Jenkins): Probably want to be on retainer at that point.
0:19:29 - (Jake Ward): Exactly. But happy to chat with people. If you ever have an idea, feel free to reach out.
0:19:34 - (Doug Jenkins): Awesome. Well, Jake, it's been really enlightening. A lot of great topics to consider there. And thanks for your time today.
0:19:40 - (Jake Ward): No, I appreciate it, Doug, thanks.
0:19:44 - (Doug Jenkins): Thanks again to Jake for joining us. I really did enjoy our conversation today and hope you gained a little insight into how to protect your intellectual property. It really is important for you to do that for your business. Just a quick heads up. Taking a little time off for some r and r before we get into the heart of the busy summer schedule around here. So no podcast next week? We should be back the following week, though, with episode 117 of Chamber Amplified.
0:20:08 - (Doug Jenkins): Make sure you subscribe and you'll never miss an episode in your podcast player. Chamber Amplified is a free podcast for the community thanks to the investment of members in the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce. And because of our robust membership, we're able to focus on providing timely information to the Findlay and Hancock county business community from leadership programs for adults and teenagers, and to be an advocate for the entire area while also providing tools to help local businesses succeed.
0:20:33 - (Doug Jenkins): If that sounds like something you'd like to be a part of, just let me know and we can talk about how an investment in the chamber not only helps strengthen your business, but the entire community. That'll do it for this week's episode. If you have any ideas for topics that we should cover on future episodes, just send me an email djenkinsinleyhancockchamber.com dot thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time on chamber amplified from the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce.