How to defend your patent for under £100
Video Transcript
I constantly have start-up owners and entrepreneurs coming to me asking why do I bother to protect my ideas with a patent when I could never afford to defend a patent application if it went to court. How on earth could I ever protect my ideas? Why would anyone bother going through the patent process?
Now, it is a huge urban myth that it costs a fortune to defend your patent. it simply isn’t the case. You can actually use your patent to protect your concept for no money at all, and in this video, I’m going to explain how.
The first thing you can do with your patent application to stop copyists is on Amazon. If someone puts a product that’s infringes your patent onto Amazon, there is a system where you can simply (in a few clicks) tell Amazon that this product is infringing your intellectual property. It doesn’t have to be a patent, it can be a registered design (which covers the aesthetic look of the product), it can even be copyright if it’s your images or your text description that has been copied and you can report that and Amazon will de-list that product. It costs you nothing! All you’ve needed to do is get your proper intellectual property protection in place first, and that does cost something, but then it is free to defend that and to stop copyists. It’s just a few clicks on the Amazon website.
What about brick-and-mortar retailers? So, for example, you’ve got a product on the market and then you find that a copycat product that infringes your patent appears in the likes of Argos. The first step would be to write to Argos, tell them that they have a product that infringes your patent and guess what? The same thing happens as with Amazon! They don’t want the bad press of selling copycat products. They don’t want to undermine people who have new ideas and who have protected them and often they will simply de-list the copycat product. You may even get you a listing with them because you can go back to them and say “You clearly wanted that product. I can provide it for you but this is the original product, the one that I designed not a copycat.”
So, there are two ways there that you can actually enforce your patent that doesn’t need to cost you anything.