At present, with the growing prosperity and development of China's industrial and commercial agency industry, many enterprises will seek agency services entrusted by their businesses when applying for patents. Therefore, its application process is roughly as follows:
1, business consulting. After the enterprise has the will to apply for a patent, it needs to consult the industrial and commercial agency in detail to determine whether the invention belongs to patentable content;
2. Sign the entrustment agreement. If the two parties establish a cooperative relationship, they need to sign a formal entrustment agreement to clarify the rights and obligations of both parties and constrain the behavior of the entrusted agent.
3. Technical disclosure. In this link, the applicant needs to provide the industrial and commercial agency with the background information about the invention or the relevant content entrusted for retrieval, and at the same time, it needs to help the patent agent fully understand the content of the invention.
4. Determine the application plan. On the basis of understanding the invention and creation, patent agents make a preliminary judgment on the prospect of patent application, issue specific application scope, protection scope and content, and then make preliminary preparations for patent application.
5. Prepare application documents. Mainly includes: (1) writing patent application documents; (2) Making application documents; (3) Submit a patent application and obtain a patent application number.
6. Submit the application materials and wait for the audit results. In this step, the Chinese Patent Office will review the patent application documents to determine whether the materials are complete and meet the filing requirements. If approved, authorize.
7. Go through the patent registration formalities. After completing the above operations, the handling personnel only need to go through the registration formalities in accordance with the requirements of the patent authorization notice to receive the patent certificate.
In addition, after clarifying the patent application process, we also need to understand the common misunderstandings in patent application. In short, these situations mainly include:
1. thinks that self-developed technologies can have intellectual property rights without applying for patents. This is actually a very wrong concept. In China, patent application adopts the principle of first application. If the developer does not apply, it will not be able to obtain the patent right and will not be protected by law.
You can't apply for a patent until the new product is put into mass production. It is suggested that developers should not have such luck. Because it may be too late to apply after production, even if the patent is authorized, the patent may be in an unstable state.
3, the improvement of patented products do not need to apply for a patent. It can be said that the consequence of falling into this misunderstanding is equivalent to not applying for a patent. Because when others improve the product and apply for a patent, which in turn restricts the product upgrade of the original patentee, the original patentee may become an infringer in the later stage.
4, a technological achievement can only apply for a patent. This is also a common misunderstanding among developers. At present, patents are divided into invention patents, utility model patents and appearance patents. If a technological achievement meets the conditions for granting three kinds of patents, it can apply for multiple special projects at the same time to protect the technological achievement in all directions.
The above is a brief description of the patent application process and common misunderstandings in patent application. In real life, it is necessary for enterprises to have a specific understanding of the above contents before applying for a patent, so as to ensure that the related matters of patent application are clear and promote the operation related to patent application to be more standardized and orderly!