Patents
Laws and legal information about patents
What Is a PCT Patent Application?
PCT stands for Patent Cooperation Treaty. A PCT patent application is an international patent application used to secure your right to file national patent applications in countries that are parties to the treaty. Presently, with few exceptions, nearly all industrialized nations are signatories to the PCT.At its most basic, PCT application functions as a placeholder in time to secure the priority date for your invention, which allows you to postpone the expense of filing individual national patent applications in each of the countries for which you want to pursue protection. By filing a PCT patent application you incur a single initial filing fee (currently approximately three thousand dollars), but postpone all of the additional expenses of the national patent process for approximately 30 months from the application's priority date. Read more
Patent Overview
A patent is a government-recognized right in a new, useful, non-obvious solution to a technical problem. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office grants an inventor the right exclude others from using his invention for a set period of time. U.S. patents are granted for four types of discoveries/inventions: machines, manmade products, compositions of matter, and processing methods. Read more