How to Bootstrap a Rock Solid IP Portfolio , Presented by Steven Colby

Good evening. Welcome. I'm Stephen Kolbe, and I am very happy that you're able to attend this evening's lecture. I'm a patent attorney, and I'm a partner at Ramon Law Firm. I have a long history of working with early-stage startups. In the 1990s, I spent most of my time as a CTO for a scientific instrument company. And I'm the type of person who just like loves working trade show floors and selling things and so on. I also did a lot of the product development and engineering. And in my career, I switched over to intellectual property because I liked working with early-stage startups a lot, and it kind of made me feel really good. So the purpose of my presentation today is to give you all a feeling for how, assuming that you have a startup or you have some ideas that you think might be patentable, how you can get bootstrapped IP protection. In other words, how you can manage it even before you've raised lots of money. The goal is that when you finish listening to this lecture, you're going to have an idea of, okay, I know I'm going to be able to take care of the IP issue in my company and I can worry about other things. So one more thing before I start, I want to give a little bit of a disclaimer. In this presentation, by giving this presentation, I'm not intending to establish a client-attorney relationship with you. In order to establish such relationship, there has to be an agreement in writing and a bunch of other paperwork and so on. But in the meantime, enjoy. I will take questions at the end, so just put them near the end of the lecture. Put questions in the chat, and I will go and take a look at them. I will also be posting my LinkedIn and email address at the end of lecture. So if you have any questions and would like to reach out to me or contact me directly, that would be just great. All right. So let's move on. The first question is why would you do this? Imagine you're a tiny little startup with pennies in the bank. You've, you've, you've taken a loan out on your VW Bug, right? And you're going to try to build a company. Why would you want to spend lots of money on intellectual property? Well, a lot of people ask that question, and sometimes there's a lot of wrong answers out there too. Sometimes I'll hear people say, even to investors, they say, oh, we're not worried about the competition. We have patent applications, and so we don't have to worry about competition at all. We'll just kill them with our IP. And, you know, that is pretty much a wrong answer. It's going to be 3 to 5 years before your patent issues. It's really common for the patents to be issuing just at the time the founders are doing their exit, their fabulous exit, right? Also, enforcing intellectual property in the United States is a very expensive proposition. A typical case is something on the order of $2 to $4 million to enforce a portfolio of patent applications, and if that happens to your startup, you're no longer a startup trying to start a business, you're a patent enforcement company. And while that might make you some money, it's certainly not the type of money you would make as a unicorn startup, and it's not the type of money that your investors are wanting to see. So the question is now, why is IP so important for startups? Well, there's one word answer. It's valuation, right? The intellectual property that you have, especially patents, can really act as a multiplier to the value of your company. I work in the area of Silicon Valley startups. These are startups that hope to become unicorns, that wanna exit in 5 years, that expect to get venture capital investment and investments from angels, and eventually either be sold to some big guy, some big company, or, you know, go IPO. In this type of company, you're constantly raising more money and you're having to sell equity for that money. And whenever that happens, the price, the value of your company depends on how much money you get for your equity. And patents can be a really significant factor in this. Investors will expect it. You better have patents. If you don't have any patents at all, they're going to look at you sideways. I think it's going to be their expectation, but if you do it right, it's not just checking a box in a PowerPoint slide, you know, on your A and B round. It's going to be, oh, this really counts. You know, somebody put some thought into the patent portfolio, and you'll be able to convey to your subsequent later round investors that, hey, this is something that's really valuable, and then it can make a big difference. My goal is that every time my clients raise money, I've paid for myself many times over. Unfortunately, I can't exactly prove that, but kind of that's the purpose of my work. This is how I go at doing things. So you want to do that. You want to have a patent portfolio, and you want to have one that really adds to the value of your company. I have a couple of times in my career seen exits where an acquirer had a choice between more than one company to acquire, and they chose the one with really great patent portfolio and paid hundreds of millions of dollars for it. And that choice, you know, meant either do or die. The other company folded their doors a few weeks later, right? It was only one going to get bought, and the patent portfolio made the part made the big difference. The other thing was that the CEO was a really nice guy. So anyway, let's get on. That's why you want to do patents and other types of intellectual property, but especially patents. So let's talk a little bit about what it is. You know, my assumption is that if you're going to do a startup, you have some idea about intellectual property. This is property unlike a car or a typewriter. You remember typewriters? Okay, sorry, a computer. I'm dating myself. Other things that these are are things like copyright and trademark and trade secrets and patents. As a matter of fact, I have a slide just for that. There you go. OK, what can you get as a startup? You can get copyright. And copyright covers the story, the actual words in the story. So copyright. Might tell a story about a young boy who, when he's 10 years old, discovers that he's a witch and he goes to the— gets to go to a magic school. That covers the words of that story, but it doesn't cover the idea of a young boy going to magic school, right? It's actually the writing in the story that it covers. In software, copyright protects the code. It could also protect your website or your interface or the screens of your app, right? So those are the things that are kept covered by copyright. An engineer could write the same program in a different language with, you know, just variations in design and how it's laid out, and that wouldn't be protected by copyright. So you can copy the idea but you can't copy the actual text. So that's copyright. Now copyright's really inexpensive. You should put a copyright statement in your code or the bottom of your website or in your packaging and literature. That's important. And that doesn't cost you anything. You just say copyright and the company name or the date, just the copyright and the date if it shows somewhere else. If you want to register your copyright, you can do that at with the federal government. You can— there's a website you can do it on. It costs only a few dollars, I think like $25. And that will give you an actual copyright registration. Most people don't bother registering everything. You can register it at a later date. You just need to keep track of when something was produced, who produced it, and make sure that in your contractor agreements and in your employer agreements, employee agreements that you have something, you're going to have an intellectual property paragraph, and one of those things that is automatically going to be assigned to the company is the copyright and trade secrets and patents as well. But that's the copyright part. So the reason for registering a copyright is you have to register it before you enforce it against somebody. So it's nice to have a few things registered. You might grab a few of the key image key web pages, or if you have an app with a really special design, you might want to register a copyright on that. But the next best thing is just to put notice in all the written materials that you have or the video materials that you have. And that will give you initial protection. Trademarks are the next piece of intellectual property that you're going to be looking at. Trademarks are meant to convey and identify a brand. Or service, right? So Kellogg's is a brand of cereal, right? Kleenex— I don't have a Kleenex box around here, but yeah, you guys know what that is. So Kleenex is a brand name for tissues, nose tissues, what are they called, and they have had to protect that brand pretty significantly because it became just a household word, right? You want it, you In your startup, you want to have that problem. That's a good sign. But the trademark doesn't— again, it's the thing that you sell your product with. It's the identifier that you hope people recognize going down the street or businesses recognize. Something like Zoom, right? That's a brand name for the software that we're using to watch this lecture. So those are trademarks, and trademarks are specific to different categories. A trademark for diapers is in a different category from a trademark for legal software, even though there might be some— no, never mind. So the trademarks are used in that way. They're relatively inexpensive. You can start off getting some initial common law trademark protection just by putting a little TM next to the use of the mark that you plan to do, whether it's a word mark or a symbol of some sort, that— make sure you write down when you first started using that in commerce, when you first started using it in advertising or on the web, on a website. And that will give you initial protection. You don't need to register trademarks right away because starting to use it gives you that initial protection. There's a few companies— sorry, few countries that are exceptions, like China, China. There it's a first-to-file situation. The other thing that you want to make sure you do is you want to check and do some initial trademark searches. Go on the U.S. government's Patent and Trademark website. Go Google the name you're planning on using for your company or for your products and make sure somebody else isn't using it first. There's nothing as bad as going along and in 2.5 years realizing that somebody else in New Jersey was— has— and, and New York has been selling the same product or service as you have under the same name, and they were a year ahead of you. That's a big nightmare and branding issues, and that's the type of mistake you don't really need to do. So have it searched. You can have an attorney do a trademark clearance search, which looks for the marks in all kinds of different word variations and in different languages and so on. That's trademarks. Trade secrets is really important for a lot of startups, and you want to have a straight trade secret program. You should be asking your attorneys, how do I establish trade secrets? Trade secrets are the things that you keep secret that you don't want to tell anybody else. Preferably, they're things that other people can't reverse engineer, right? They can't figure out what you're doing. A trade secret could be on a backend server, for instance, or it could be a way of making some material or designing some apparatus. Your design process could be a trade secret. Also, trade secrets are your suppliers, your customers' lists, the salaries that you pay people, that all kinds of stuff is trade secrets. The difference between good trade secrets and bad trade secrets is documentation. So for a few hours work, you know, a couple of days, you can put a program together where you identify each trade secret. You actually put limits in your company, you know, on your servers or whatever information handling system you have to make sure only a limited number of people have access to those trade secrets. You actually have to do something about them. You have to warn new employees when they see those trade secrets that they're trade secrets. And again, there's programs that you can put in place that make that much stronger. And so if there ever is a dispute, if somebody leaves or somebody manages to get one of your trade secrets improperly, you can turn around and document it and say, look, they knew it was a trade secret. We proved it. We can prove they knew. They signed a document when they First, we're given access to this information acknowledging that it's a trade secret. So that's, that's a good system to have in place because that gets you one step closer to solving your trade secret problem. The difficulty with trade secrets, of course, is that somebody independently could come up with the same idea. You know, you've got a great trade secret, you're, you're getting your company on it and everything's going fantastic, and all of a sudden you see an article written in Wired magazine laying out the whole thing, right, and somebody else came up with the idea. So trade secrets are only as good as long as they're secrets, and somebody else can come up with them that you can't if they do it independently without stealing yours. Then that's it, the trade secret's gone. So that's it. Finally, the exciting point in this slide is the patent slide, the discussion of patents coming here. So Patents cover general ideas of new inventions, and this is, you know, not something you would cover with copyright. It's not— it's something that you're going to— it's eventually going to be public, so it's not going to be a trade secret. But a patent is developed by writing a patent application, usually by an attorney, submitting it to the Patent Office, and then going through what's called patent prosecution, an examination process where there's a back and forth between the Patent Office and your attorney or yourself, and you have to persuade the Patent Office that what you have is both original— in other words, it hasn't been done before— and it's not obvious over all the other things that have been done before. Those are the two criteria for getting— two of the criteria for something that's patentable. The third criteria is that there's some— you're not supposed to be able to patent pure algorithms, mathematical concepts, laws of nature, no patenting new laws of nature, right? If you find a new subatomic particle, you can't patent it. Sorry. You get a Nobel Prize, but you're not going to get a patent. All right. So that's what patents are. They're much more expensive than copyrights, trademarks, or trade secrets. But they are important and they do provide significant value for early-stage startups. Let's talk a little bit about what kind of patents we can get here. All right. Oops. So here we go. There's 3 main types of patents that I'm going to talk about. There's a couple of others that I won't. For instance, there's such a thing as plant patents, which you would think would be strong in areas like cannabis, but not really. There's some plant patents for seeds by some large agricultural companies, but in, in practice, the most common types of patents that a startup would consider are what's called a provisional patent application, a non-provisional patent application, and both of those eventually become what's called a utility patent. Then there's also design patents. Now, design patents are kind of a funny thing. I don't do very many of them, but they cover the shape, the ornamental shape. They're not supposed to cover the functional part of something. They cover the ornamental shape. So a good example of a design patent would be a hubcap with a cool design in it or the tread on a tire. My favorite design patent, which I was— I was sort of involved in, my firm was back in when I first started working, is the design for the Polycom speakerphone. A lot of you, I'm sure almost all of you, have seen the speakerphone that's got a kind of a triangular shape. It kind of looks nice on the desk, right? That was one of the most valuable patents Polycom got when they were an early-stage company. That design patent was actually litigated. There's been recently designed patent battles between Apple and Samsung. So they can make a big difference, but it's not as common as the provisional and non-provisional— of the utility patents that come from provisional and non-provisional applications. So let's go jump back to the provisional application here. A provisional patent application is basically just a placeholder. It has some big disadvantages. It only lasts for 1 year as an application, and at the end of that 1 year, you have to file a non-provisional application that references it, that takes benefit of it. If you don't do that, the provisional application goes poof, like it was never filed. That can be an advantage if you decide you want to keep something secret, but you have to be able to file do a non-provisional application within a year, right? It's good as a placeholder. It's quick and easy. I have filed provisional patent applications that were mostly somebody's really extensive slide deck explaining all the fun parts of a company. There were papers submitted for publications or articles that were going to come out. It's very inexpensive. The filing fee for a small entity is about $150. It doesn't have the formal requirements of a full patent application, a full non-provisional patent application. And as such, it often has lots of holes in it. So this is the disadvantage of it. If you throw something together, it's a pretty good chance that it's going to have things that are missing. Let's just compare a slide deck with a 40-page double-spaced paper with figures. Right? There's a lot more in the full non-provisional patent application, which might be the 40-page document, right? And the things that are missing are holes, right? It's something that wasn't good. The provisional— this is what to remember— the provisional application is only good for the words that are on the page there. If you've skipped something out or not explained something fully, then you're not getting a date for that content. So I try to, you know, make sure that when my clients do provisional applications and I help them with it, that it's really at least covers enough to support some, some claims. One of the uses of the provisionals that I just talked about is if you're about to make a disclosure. So let's say you're going to go pitch your company, you're going to talk to investors who are not going to sign an NDA, but you're going to have to go out there in a semi-public forum and talk about your, you know, invention in your company, it's really nice to have something filed before you do that because that gives you a filing date before the public disclosure. In the United States, you can— if after you make something public or use it in public, you have a year to file your patent application. In the rest of the world, you don't have any buffer. If you make a public disclosure, that's prior art against your patent application. It can kill you if you tell too much, right? Another good advantage for startups for provisional applications is, you know, sometimes you pivot a little bit, right? So the big product in the direction you think you're going today is going to be different in 3 months, and then again you're going to turn a little bit 3 months after that. So companies that are just figuring out what they're going to do and they're kind of still developing their technology and so on, provisional applications are great because they're not so expensive. And then if you do a 180 or 90-degree turn, all of a sudden the stuff you've filed isn't really important anymore. It really feels good to have spent a really small amount of money on it instead of tens of thousands, right? Because it's like, oh, OK, good. And then if during the first year you file a bunch of provisional applications, all of those can be scooped up and put and referenced in one non-provisional application. So it's actually a nice strategy to go ahead and start with the provisional, and then as you develop more and more things, just add to that document and refile as a new provisional application. And, and by the end of the year, you might have some pretty— something pretty substantial that, that has a lot of content to it. So I did mention the cost here. So let's get down to the nitty. This presentation is about bootstrapping, right? And so before I show you the next slide, which actually has numbers on it, right? I tell people that when they're doing a startup, they ought to have some money in the bank. Now, if you're working or even not working and you want to do a startup and you have no money, that means that every time you raise money, it's do or die. And the investor will have you over a barrel, right? If you need to pay yourself and one employee who's your best friend, and you're worried about paying your rent, that's not going to work. You will be in such pressure to take a bad deal, it's not a really good idea. You should have some money. Right? So I mean like a few tens of thousands of dollars so that you can survive a little bit, right? You can, when you decide to quit your job, you can actually work for a couple months on the startup. So it's, it's my advice is if you have no money at all to get a little bit, right? It doesn't have to be a lot and it could be from your aunt, but you, you should have a little bit of money in the bank. So let's move on. You're all waiting for the center. So this is, um, a slide that shows you just really broadly— and here's going to be a disclaimer— kind of what one might expect in a patent cost. And it can vary hugely, but this is kind of what you should have in mind for a feel of what things might cost. So here we go. This is— I hope you can read the numbers— this is for a patent application, assuming— now, a provisional application It can be— if you file— I have 2,000 here and that's supposed to represent $2,000. Now you can file a provisional application on your own, and there's a book called Patent Pending in 24 Hours by Nolo Press that's about $40, and the filing fee for a small entity or a micro entity is $150 to $75. So you can actually get a provisional application on file for under $200. I recommend that you do so with the assistance of an attorney, right? At least to review what you've put together to give you ideas and make sure that you haven't made mistakes. Very often what I see startup founders produce or inventors produce is a marketing document, you know, with a lot of hand-wavy stuff about it does this, it does that, it does everything else under the sun, you know, and by the way, it's the Star Trek tricorder and transporter built into one and it's fantastic, but they don't explain how, right? The patent application needs to be a technical document, not marketing fluff, right? I don't want a lot of writing about how great it is. I don't want a big essay about what the prior art was. I want the technical details of the thing. So I work with— when I have a startup that's just beginning, sometimes they'll come to me and say, oh, will you write patents for for equity and I'll do the math with them and they'll go, ooh, that's expensive. And my answer is usually, let's do a provisional application on a budget, right? Get some— I will work with you, we'll do a disclosure meeting, I'll give you— I'll help you with some drawings and I will do some claim sets for you and give you an outline and then tell you to go and fill it all in. And sometimes it's really funny, I'll have a couple of founders and they'll look at each other and they'll say, 'Can you write a paper? Can you write 30 pages?' And they'll, they'll, they'll, you know, be in their late 20s and they haven't written a paper for, you know, since they were freshmen in college, right? So sometimes it takes a little, a little bit of work, but, right, I give this to them and they write the stuff up and we file it as a provisional application. And that's designed between my help and making sure there's some supportable claims in there, and it has a good outline, and the feedback of, you know, going back and forth and looking at a couple of drafts. I'm expecting to spend roughly 4 hours on this, right, over a few weeks to help get this thing on file. And that gives basically a good stake in the ground for a startup. I recommend doing that, you know, before you start pitching, before you start— put your product up on the Apple Store, right? That's a good way to get things going. Now, a year later, the clock goes really fast. This is a part of relativity that Einstein had not discovered, the provisional patent relativity part. Once you file that provisional, 1 year goes by really quickly. It compresses time. And all of a sudden, you'll be there. It'll be 1 year after, after your filing and you'll be going, oh my God, did we raise money? So once you file that provisional, you go from being a quiet little— what's the word I want— stealth mode startup to screaming to the world, come invest in us, buy our product, now's the time, now's the time. Because you want to, within that year, have actually raised a good round of money. You want to have raised maybe half a million, a million dollars, whatever the you know, depends widely on your startup. But you would like to, at the end of that year, have a proper budget for doing IP. And then you'll be able to pay somewhere between, you know, up to maybe $18,000, $15,000 to $18,000 for a patent attorney to write a full patent application for you, a non-provisional application that again will reference the provisional. And that's how you get credit for it. So that's what happens. Hopefully you'll have raised money by then. When I— when founders come to me and say, oh, we're going to do a startup, what, you know, how much is intellectual property? I say very roughly, again, depending on the type of startup, you might put in your first-year budget $35,000 to $50,000 for intellectual property. And that's assuming you're going to raise, you know, $300,000 to a million, right, a decent amount of money. But that should get you 3 patent applications on file, right? And then— and that's a good start for you because you're busy doing other stuff too. That's— but I think on average that's pretty okay for an early-stage startup for, you know, their first year. Now, there's a second line in the graph here, and that's family members. It turns out that with a U.S. patent, It can have a daughter and it can have grandchildren, so one application can spur a whole series of patent applications. And of course, there are ways that you can add more disclosure to those called a continuation in part filing. And when you then count, count those in, historically for my clients, if they've built a big portfolio, I see the average cost of getting an application on file drop to maybe $9,000 to $12,000. $100,000. So after the first really big important ones in, the price is going to drop. All right, now the next stage in this graph, you see this number $30,000. Okay, once the patent application is in the Patent Office, between a year or two, the Patent Office is going to get back to you almost always with a rejection. And it's hard, being an examiner is a hard job. They will find some art that's similar and you will then have to have your attorney explain to them why they're wrong, all the legalese and analysis of your claims and their prior art. And that might go around on average maybe 2 to 3 times. It can be a lot more. Things can go to appeal. There's processes where you can fight it out in court, which are really expensive processes. Sometimes, you know, probably 1 in 20, there's allowed claims on the first round and you get— you decide those are great claims and, and you just have a few thousand dollars to pay the issue fee and things like that, and that's great. But this is just to give you an idea of your expectations, and that $30,000 may take another 3 years, 4 years, right? So every time there's an office action, your attorney could charge you, you know, probably $3,000 to $6,000 for responding to it, right? So that's something to expect as your patent portfolio grows. You know, there's more and more of those now. There's a little— in my graph here it says patent costs US, OK? So I'm not talking about foreign filing here. It's a different kettle of fish. It's another expense. You don't need to worry about the foreign filing until a year after you filed your first application. Application. So just as when you file a provisional application, you have 1 year, very strict deadline to file the nonprovisional. You can just before the end of that year, you can decide whether you or not you want to go into foreign countries, go outside the United States, and there's some procedures to make it easy and extend the decision-making process about which countries you're going into, something called a PCT application, and that costs roughly $4,000 to $5,000. But gives you another 18 months to decide exactly which countries you're going in. Most startups do not do a lot of countries, right? Nobody's going to get a patent application— and I mean, I got it, I'm jumping ahead of myself. This is it. Will you rule the world? No. You will— a very aggressive portfolio is going to cover China, the US, Europe, and maybe Japan or Korea, right, depending on your market. I have clients in ag tech that do, you know, Eastern Europe and Australia and South Africa and places where— or Argentina— where there's agriculture, where they grow a specific agricultural product. So it will depend on where your technology is and what kind of technology you have, but you're not going to have a budget for doing patents worldwide. There will always be some competition, right? In most countries that you're going to be concerned about, patents are relatively enforceable, meaning it's getting better and better in China, right? It's— and I have seen cases where a U.S. company enforces a Chinese patent against another U.S. company and makes a really big splash. Because the big company that's being accused of patent infringement has to really scramble. They have no idea what's going to happen to them in Chinese courts, right? So it can be useful. It takes a pretty good budget to enforce. You will hopefully be really big. The one reason that you might want to file outside the United States is that in 5 years you're hoping that Samsung or Alibaba is going to buy you, right? Or some European company is going to buy you. And if that's the case, then you, you might pay more attention to filing applications in the, the countries where your potential acquirers are. But otherwise, you, you hopefully have, you know, $20 million in business in the country before you'd even consider filing patents there. All right. Okay. Let's now— so I've given you a little idea about the process that you might go through and ways in which I advise startups to get the patent and the IP process going on a minimum budget, right? So you ought to be able to— you ought to be able to— if you can't afford a couple thousand dollars, save some money up, right? Get some— get get some family, friends and family money, or save it up in your bank account, right? I'm going to talk a little bit now about some of the things that can go wrong, right? If you're going to be a startup and use IP, you have to do it right, and there is a dark side, OK? You— what you don't know can hurt you. There are ways that IP can come back and really whack you. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about that. It's kind of, you know, there's a lot of mistakes that early-stage startups can make, and several of those have to do with IP. And so let's talk a little bit about that so that when you do this patent stuff, you don't get squashed. And moving on. Okay, here's some mistakes. These are the top 5 ways that, in my book, that startups can mess up. The first 2 are ownership, okay, and it's there twice because it has to be. Ownership of the IP is really critical, and I'm going to talk about the 2 different types of ownership that you need to become concerned about. The other one is waiting, is not dealing with IP until you've been in business, you've already got the app on the App Store or you're selling the product and you're like, oh, maybe we should get some, you know, you're finally one of your angel investors says, well, where's your patents? And you scramble and all of a sudden you realize you're in trouble because you can't file out anymore outside the United States. There's one thing I want to say about use, public use, is if it's hidden on a backend server, in other words, if it's just a web interface, and nobody who's using the web server actually gets to see the magic sauce on your servers and your code, that's still public use. There, there, as long as the benefit is seen publicly, that counts as public use. So don't wait. I'm going to go a little off track here and tell you a story about this. It turns out that the case law for this public use comes from the 1880s, '70s, 80s, and there was a guy who invented a corset with whalebone for his wife. This is, you know, to make her figure look really good, right? And she went out in public, and even though she wore all the Victorian garments over the top, the benefit of her narrow waist was seen in the public, and that was counted as public use. Now, there's going to be some exceptions. For example, there's an experimental use exception, which is very narrow and is not applicable in every country, right? So if you have a patent for a new asphalt for roadway and you have to go out and test it, if you actually do perform good testing, that can be excused as experimental use, not public use, right? So waiting is important. Strategy is really important, and we're going to get to strategy in a minute. Don't just randomly patent things. It's expensive, right? And there's not— I want patents to give value, and if you have a proper strategy, then you're going to get the most value of it. Okay, the fifth thing here is understanding the patent, and you by this time will be working with a patent attorney, and they— you should ask them, they should explain to you the different parts. There's something called a specification, which is all the text, all the writing. And then some figures and the drawings. And then there's the claims. The specification can say, I don't care, lots of stuff in the world. What's covered by some— the patent, whether it's yours or somebody else's, is the limitations in the claim, right? If something includes everything in every one of those limitations, it infringes your claims. If it's missing one of those elements in the claims, then it's not. All right, so it's the claims that define the scope of the patent. There could be a lot of text in the detailed description about stuff that's not claimed, and very often that's the case. As I mentioned, it's possible for a patent application in the U.S. to have a daughter and a granddaughter. It can have entirely different sets of claims based on the same specification, and a lot of times people come to me and say, oh my God, I saw this patent, it had described all this stuff that I did, you know, years ago, and I say, yeah, but that's not not what's claimed. It's some narrow thing over here. So you— it's important as a decision maker and as an officer in a startup company to understand which parts of the patent are which. OK, so now let's go and let's dive in a little more detail on some of these things. OK, first thing on ownership, you need to own your own IP. OK, this means every contractor, every employee, everybody advisor, right, both the co-founders has to have clauses in their agreements that say they assign, they hereby assign all the inventions in the space, in the business space of the company to the company, right? There has to be assignment clauses. And I have seen things like Upwork. People contract for engineering on Upwork and the engineer comes up with an idea. Well, somewhere in the Upwork web pages, when you create a job, there's a box to check, and there's several different IP boxes, and you need to check the one that gives you the most coverage, right? Otherwise, you don't own it, right? The— 2 years later, you'll come back to them and say, oh, could you give us an assignment for this? We've— you know, our attorneys say we are missing an assignment on this invention, and the person will say to you, yeah, just write me a check. So that can be really painful. It's very important everybody— advisors, okay, everybody, not inventors— oh no, sorry, not investors, they don't usually have that many ideas, but anyway, everybody, both founders or all the founders, the contractors, the employers, and the advisors should all have IP agreements in their agreement. So they know that it's employer IP. And it depends on which state you're in. Some states are much more aggressive. I practice in California, and in California, you can't own every idea that the person has. If you are a software company and they invent a new baby rattle, that's theirs, right? You don't get— unless it's a software-enabled baby rattle. Okay. So yes, there are limitations, and then this is a state-by-state thing. The Patent Office has an assignment system, just like when you buy and sell a house. There's a record of who owns the patent, and it is by default initially in the inventors, not in the company. This varies from— in other countries, it could be a little bit different. In Spain, for example, it's my understanding— I'm not a Spanish attorney, but it's my understanding that the company owns things by default. So What you're going to have people do is sign an assignment agreement when the patent application is first filed, and that's actually recorded in the patent office. And when you get new investors, they're going to make sure you did that. And when you get acquired, they are going to drill down on that really extensively. And if you're missing an assignment at that point, you better hope that somebody's really sweet to you because you could be in trouble, right? So That's something that your patent attorneys should all keep in place. So this is the first part about ownership in IP. Now the second part of ownership in IP has to do with other people's IP. Okay, toxic, right? There's two sides to the argument about whether companies should go and look around at others' IP, others' patent applications. And there's really a big difference between an early-stage startup and an established company. So if you're a big established electronics company, you don't want to know about other people's patents because if you put yourself on notice of them, that can increase the damages that you experience if they sue you. But from my point of view, if you're an early-stage startup, you want to know now before you've put 3 or 4 years of your life and $1 million of your investors' money in it. You want to know what's out there and Look at it, work around it. If it's going to kill you, then try to buy it, but don't spend 4 years of your life, which is a lot more important than anybody's money, trying on some idea and then realizing that there's a— somebody else has a patent on it already. So I recommend that people read the literature. As a scientist, right, I was taught in graduate school to go into the library and spend a few hours a week reading journals and getting ideas. So if you're an early-stage startup, I would go and, you know, of course you read, you look on Google and you read all the industry literature, but you also go to the patent office and look at your competitors and see what they have or what similar companies might have, and you'll probably get more ideas doing that. You'll look at somebody else's patent and go, oh my gosh, right, if we took that and got and added our stuff, it would be the greatest thing in the world. So it's actually worth reading, quote unquote, reading literature. So I advise early-stage companies to go ahead and do and read. It brings the question of doing actual searches. I have some clients that do searches, that request searches, a couple. They do it before filing the more expensive— preparing the more expensive non-provisional application, but people It's not— the cost of a search is— a good quality search is maybe $1,000 roughly. It could be as high as $5,000 or as low as $600, and the quality is proportional. But you know, there's always going to be something. Somebody else could have filed a patent application a month ago and you're not going to find it in a search because it's not public yet, right? So I I sometimes, if a client wants it, I'll do searches, but normally we don't, right? Hopefully the client knows enough about the business space and where they're working to have an idea of what other people are doing, okay? Keep records of your meetings, of notes, right? If you're, you know, when I have a meeting with a client or if I have a networking meeting or a company meeting with my companies, I take notes and put down whose idea was what, who came up with stuff. This helps settle disputes later. That, that's a good thing to have. Keep good records to show that you developed this and it wasn't that employer— employee you hired 2 months later that came from a competitor that is now suing you for trade secret theft, right? If you have, no, here's our meeting notes from 3 months earlier that goes through all these details. That's going to save your rear end. There is one thing I want to point out about open source software. You need to read the license agreement. There are open source software that says, if you use our software, you have to make yours open source. And it's free to use by anybody. OK? Don't accidentally put that into some— to your code, right? And don't use— be very careful with employees that are coming from other companies. Make sure, and you know, it's both, they're going to do this both in writing and verbally, that they cannot bring anything from another company. Because if they say, oh, I, you know, I wrote that solution, you know, those routines for this interface 2 years ago at so-and-so, and they find the code and drop it in, they make it look different, uh, but you're still getting set up to be sued. And that's a nasty, nasty lawsuit where you know you're going to lose. It's just going to be a question of how much you're going to pay, right? So be careful of other people's IP while at the same time establishing your own IP. All right, so when should you start this? It's easy. Yesterday, right? So it's a first-to-file world, OK? Provisionals are cheap. I can get 5 pages of notes from you, throw a cover sheet on, and file as a provisional, and that's gives you some stake in the ground, right? And it's cheap. Didn't cost anything, right? You might have a design idea. You might have a 5-page business plan. I'll take the technical part from that, not the marketing part. I don't want that stuff. I want the technical stuff of the new development. Put that in as a provisional application, and it's— it could be, if you never reference it, that it goes away and never gets published, never gets exposed. But it— but if you want, you can always within that year, reference it in a non-provisional patent application and get credit for that filing date for that material. So start early. It's very rare that companies wish they didn't file earlier, right? So that's that, and, you know, often the patent attorney is the first attorney you talk to, right? And then you talk to the corporate people and the employment people and so on, but getting the IP established I'd like to see that done before you go start trying to raise money and having to talk to investors, right? All right, let's move on here. We got a few minutes left. So strategy, okay? This is my pet peeve. I was a CTO of a scientific instrument company through most of the '90s, and that meant it was a relatively small company. It meant that, I had to do engineering. I spent a lot of time doing CAD drawings and building electronics and writing code. And I also had to do sales. I did a lot of trade shows. That was my— I actually love trade shows. I miss— that's one thing I miss about being an attorney. Patents are not to make engineers happy. Patents are for the sales and marketing people. I can't emphasize that enough, right? I want the sales guy to say, we're the only one who's got This, that's why you want to buy our product, right? I just knocked over my water bottle. Anyway, so I want to be the— I want your sales and marketing people to be so excited about your patents. Engineering, okay, you know, they're less important to me, right? But the point is to look at your product. This is a product-driven process. When you're first going out there to pitch to inventors, there's probably 2 to 4, maybe 3 things that you're telling the— when you go pitch to investors, sorry, that you're telling the investors, our company is gonna be the best in the world. It's gonna make you $100 million because we have these great breakthroughs that nobody else has. These are the things that sell your product or services. These are the things you pitch the company about. I had a boss a long time ago who called this, these the silver bullets. These are the silver bullets of the company that's gonna make you winners, right? Those are the things that you wanna patent. You don't wanna patent the things that engineers think are really cool. You wanna patent the things that sales and marketing are really cool, all right? And when my clients get to their later rounds, like their A and B round, I very often give them a pitch, I give them a slide deck which shows those silver bullets and then kind of a web of ovals with the different patent applications and patents in it with all these lines connected. It's called a cluster map. And it really shows the value of the patent portfolio up front to people, and it makes IP more than just a checkbox. The investor, the A or B round investor, go, ah, Wow, they really, you know, you've talked about these things that make the company so great, and the next slide is, here's those things visually surrounded by our patent portfolio. And that's kind of my end goal, and I feel really happy when one of my clients uses a slide like that, because it makes the, as I said, it makes the IP more than just a checkbox, and it really hits the value of the company. Then I feel like I made a difference, and, you know, If I see an investor perk up, I go, oh yeah, my little part to this venture is really cool. So anyway, I am now going to take a look at— I'm going to bring the chat up. I'm going to bring my closing slide. Here we go. Ready? Drum roll. That's us. I work for Ramon Law. We are an international law firm. We are semi-virtual law firm. Meaning that I work from home, wherever that might be in a certain month, and most of our attorneys work from home. We do have a lot of offices though, but they're usually filled with things like conference rooms and not people's personal offices as much, and it's all over Silicon Valley and the world, so we have a pretty good presence. We do for startups, we do of course intellectual property law, we do lots of corporate law all the way up through IPO, We can do employment, real estate, international transactions, all kinds of stuff. So I'm pretty happy here. And we're also pretty price competitive. We don't pay for that beautiful 40-story building peak table view, right? Most of our attorneys, we're what I'd call a relatively flat law firm, meaning It's not lots of associates. There's more, much, almost all of us are senior attorneys with 20+ years experience. There's a few associates, but it's, you're normally, if you come to Ramone, you're normally getting somebody who spent 20 years plus at one of these big law firms that charge substantially higher rates. And we are very, it's really a great place to work because I think we provide a great value. So I'm now gonna go and bring up the chat and answer a few questions. Again, I have here on this slide, which I'm going to leave up, my email address and my LinkedIn. Please connect with me on LinkedIn. So that's a great way to connect with me. I have plenty of LinkedIn followers. All right, here we go. I'm starting at the bottom. And yes, there is going to be a recording. I am recording this presentation. I did remember. To hit the record button. Yeah, and so I will probably get it out to you, to people. My hope is by Monday. So if you are registered for this and I have your proper email, um, go ahead and, uh, you should expect something from me in the next couple of days. Uh, okay, now jumping back to the top, let's get— and I'm going to try to answer 10 or 15 minutes questions maybe, but we'll see. Um, Yes, somebody asked the same question. Recording, yep. Yes, somebody's asking about copyrighting screens. That's not really a question. Yes, you can copyright the UI. It's a nice thing to copyright. And I put, the thing to do is on your software when it comes up the first time or on the about section, Somewhere in there you want to put a little notice saying copyright, name of company, blah, blah, right? And so that's a great way to start off. And you just put the word copyright. The little C with the circle means you've registered the copyright. Okay, the same— here's another tidbit. With trademarks, start off by putting that little TM by your product. The circle with the R for a trademark indicates that you actually have a registration. So you have to have registered your trademark with the Patent Office to use the circle R. Not only that, but you have to have registered it with the Patent Office of the country that the product's in. So if you're selling in Canada and you have the circle R, that's kind of implying you have a Canadian trademark registration. Of course, happens all the time, but it's not good practice. You'll end up— if you're really successful, you'll end up having registrations in a handful of countries. And it's good practice. All right. Yes, third person asks about the recording. And next person asks, yes, the slides will come with the recording. Yes. Okay. Okay. So a provisional application— somebody's asking the question, what do a provisional and non-provisional turn into? They both turn into They're both patent applications, right? We're distinguishing between a patent and a patent application. A non-provisional follows a provisional. If it doesn't, if there's a provisional by itself and the year passes, it goes away and like it was never there, right? A non-provisional application can turn into a patent. It can in some cases actually be turned into a design patent application and then a design patent. But it turns into what's traditionally called a utility patent. And that takes a few years and some money. Okay. There's a question about the definition of an avatar. Well, hopefully that's not something I'd have argued in front of one of my patent applications. And I'm happy to tell you that I'm not an avatar. I'm a real person. And you can meet me in person. I am often in the San Francisco Bay Area and in the Lake Tahoe area. I have an office in North Tahoe. And so if you ever want to meet me in person, I have my shots and I'll do one-on-ones. All right. So the— what this person is really— when he's asking about definition of something, this is a part of the art of patent. We have fights over what does switch logic mean, or what is an on state, or what does radio frequency transmitter mean. So the words of a claim, when they actually get enforced, there's a whole part of the litigation— this is why it's so expensive— there's a whole part of a litigation called a Markman hearing, which just focuses on what does all the Well, what do all the words mean? And if you put a word in your claim that isn't really well defined in the rest of the document, you could be in trouble because if it's vague, the whole claim could be thrown out. I mean, even the whole patent, right? So this is one of the things that good patent attorneys get really into is— I actually, here's another aside, sorry. My kids bug me because I collect dictionaries. I have like 2 6-foot-tall bookshelves of dictionaries. And they're always like, why do you have all these books, right? And of course they're younger, so they're not in— they're in the digital age. I was like, yeah, it's my dictionaries. I have dictionaries on aerospace. I have a dictionary of angels. I have a dictionary of farts. I have— if anybody finds a weird dictionary, get it and send to me. I like dictionaries. Anyway, so I don't know if I answered the question about what is the definition of an avatar, but it's something that would be argued between the Patent Office and a patent examiner, or a patent examiner and a patent attorney ad nauseam. I mean, hopefully it's really, it's defined in the document. And I've written a lot of software game patents, and so avatar is important, yeah. Oh, the name of the book is Patent Pending in 24 Hours by Nolo Press. And 24 hours means 24 hours of work. It doesn't mean in one day, OK? And it's— Nolo Press publishes good books. And, you know, but I do— it can be done, but it's helpful to have at least an attorney look over what you've put together, OK? True, Kevin. Yeah, so somebody is talking. It's not a question. They're saying that things are getting more complex. It says, true, Kevin, and getting only more complex. I'm not Kevin. So anyway, yes, it's hard to be an examiner. I don't envy it. I mean, they don't have a lot of time. They have to be pretty good at at knowing their space, especially new ones. And there are good ones and there are really not good ones. Okay, none of the ones I work with. But anyway, okay, moving on. Okay, somebody's giving me a comment. Good, thank you. Thank you, Kevin. All right, I'm $5, right? No, I'm sorry. Um, kill. Yes, people are— oh, they're talking. No, I set it so you guys talk to each other. That's why we're getting all this discussion. I want a question. Okay, I'm now 20— oh my God, there's 26. The message list is growing. Okay, I'm only going to look at things with question marks. I will email a link to the recording to the attendees, yes. Somebody's asking me to clarify the patenting of a patent for the marketing person or not the engineer. The point is that a valuable patent makes sales and marketing really happy. Because it makes their job easier to sell the products or services of the company because they have a patent on the thing that makes the difference in the sale, right? The engineers think cool engineering is good, but they may not be quite so focused on selling, right? There's a difference between those two types of people. Now, the founder with two— with a funny thing happens when You get like 2 or 3 founders in a room and you ask them, what are the things that are going to be most important about your product that are going to make it really sell? And you get 3 completely different answers. And then you go, OK, guys, you better figure this out. But yeah, it's the things that are pretty— sometimes the patent, an invention, is the discovery of a problem. Right? And once you've found a problem nobody realized was there before, then the engineering can actually be pretty straightforward. Right? But the— and so engineers may think, oh, that's not so big a deal. But if it's something that really distinguishes and makes the product or service much more sellable, that's important to patent. And that's what I mean by patenting for the marketing team rather than for the engineering team. Does Ramon, and that's how you pronounce it, Ramon Law, provide license and matchmaking services? I have one client that is a dating app called Wonder. Oh, that's not what you mean, but yeah, they're about to launch in Austin, Texas, I think. Anyway, we do, we provide licensing technology, we do a lot of fundraising. A lot of what I do is introduce— I work with angel groups in Silicon Valley, and so I do a lot of introductions for clients to the different angel groups, so pointing them towards good pitch opportunities. So yes, we do that, and our legal services are pretty expansive. We can— I can— my clients, I have them in Australia and China and Russia and Nobody in Africa at the moment, but, you know, all over the world. It's pretty cool. I get great people. Let's see. For the grandchild, a patent, as I said, a patent can have what's called a continuation or continuation in part. And for layman's terms, I talk about that as being a child or a grandchild. Yes, and it definitely can have new claims. And so on. I put it— okay. Oh, the question and answer box. I will pull the question and answer box up in a minute. Hold on. I'm in the chat. I will— I promise I'll do that. I have a few more minutes. I'm— okay. So here's a question about when you file, when is the timing for the international filing? It's the 1 year from your first application. Whether your first application is a nonprovisional or provisional, either one of them starts the clock for that 1 year, right? So that's— so you don't get 2 years from a provisional. You get 1 year from the earliest filing date you claim. Now, if the provisional was really not very substantive, right, it was a pitch deck, which doesn't have any— didn't have any tech stuff in it, it may not matter, and you may be able to wait another year. But it's always better to get earlier priority dates in tech that's evolving quickly like it is today. So, okay. Should a startup consider having a law firm on retainer to enforce? No. I have one litigation case right now, and it has outside funding from a financing company, this case will probably be on the order of above $3 million. So a startup, if you become a patent enforcement entity, then you're no longer— you don't have time to be a startup anymore. It's a different path, right? And so that's important. Yeah, so somebody's asking what's the constraints on a provisional application? It's a pretty informal document, but you can you can, when you go from a provisional to the non-provisional, you get to add more, lots more material. You're going to hand a provisional that might have been 6 pages written by an inventor, and you're going to have a patent attorney turn that into 35 pages, completely rewritten and huge. That, I mean, there's where the— that's why it's so expensive, is you are paying a patent attorney something like $500, $600 a page to write a provisional. And claims to write a patent application. And that's where the— that's why one can do provisionals even with the guidance, you know, and the plan I have for doing a provisional, I give you an outline and you do the work, the hours, you know, I want you to do 30 hours of writing, okay? So nobody ever gets that much, sorry. Usually I get like 7 pages and I want 20 or 30, right? But that's the way you do it. So, yeah, a provisional can have it. You can't have— you can't do video, right? That would be nice. But, yeah, you can do drawings, photographs of products, still images. Next question. If you have a trade secret and someone else files a patent. Oh, this is a tough question. So, if you have a trade secret and somebody else 3 years later files a patent application on that, can they then block you from using it? And the answer is usually no, because you had prior use. You used it before they filed their patent application, and that use is actually prior against their patent, right? So, um, yeah, you don't— that's not one of the fears. And there could be some variations in different countries, but, but one doesn't usually worry about that. You just You just have to document the trade secret really well, and that will help. Okay. I need an example on experimental patent. What you're talking about is experimental use of some technology or service before you file a patent application and that not being counted against you. So a good example is road surfaces, asphalt roads. There's tech in there. And people have built asphalt roads and tested them. And if they do it right, again, you have to have an attorney making sure you're doing it exactly right to get real test data and actually experiments, not just, I gave it to Joe and he ran. There's two case laws in this. One, a guy gave his friend a new motor for outboard motor, some new valve. And he said, here, try this for a couple of weeks and see how it goes. And the guy back said it was great. Okay, that was an experimental use. The other case is literally road surfaces, the original engineering of asphalt roads. You know, they put that road out there for several years and saw how it wore, and that was counted as experimental use because they came back every week and did measurements and recorded it, and it was a real experiment. Okay, the number of messages is growing faster than I'm going. One of the advantages— the benefit of details in extensive description in a patent application is because the claims you initially file might be amended. You might find prior art that kills your original claims and you have to narrow them. In this case, it's really helpful to have— you can only narrow or add limitations to the claim based on what's in your description. So having as many examples as possible Another reason is, I'm going to give another case and true cases. So Morse, the guy who invented Morse code, had patents on electrical communications over wires. And then Alexander Bell came along and invented the telephone. Well, Morse didn't disclose the telephone in his patent application, right, because he didn't know about it. But his claims were really broad. It said, you know, electrical communications over wires. Something like that. Well, it sounds broad, but it only really covers what's disclosed in his specification. If Morse had put in one more example saying, oh, we have a magnet and a microphone and we're going to do this with voice, then— so having lots and lots of examples, because, you know, when you're filing your patent application, even commercially, you may not know which of the many different things you're going to try is important. So having a meaty application, as much stuff as you can get into it, is really good. That's important. That's why you want a thick, meaty patent application. Okay. Somebody's asking me about being a patent attorney. Yes. You have to, in order to, so most attorneys are licensed by states. So I am, a California attorney, right? I'm licensed by the state of California to practice law in general, right? I could do— I've done one restraining order in 20 years, okay? So I can do other things. I can do licensing agreements and assignments and stuff like that. To be a patent attorney, you're licensed by the federal government, by the Patent and Trademark Office, and the requirements are there that you have to have a technical background, and that means either certain technical degrees or certain coursework that qualifies you for it. But if you do have a technical degree and you're just graduating from college right now, going to work for the Patent Office is a pretty cool way to start. You might have thought you were going to be an engineer or a chemist, but you can get a nice job at the Patent Office. In the old days, I don't know if it's still true, but they would put you through law school and then 5 or 10 years later you quit there and go work for a law firm and you're in pretty good shape. So it is a good, starting entry job. It's fun. Okay, business— next question is, do businesses patent websites? Yes. That's— it's not— the design of the website would be covered by a copyright, but the functionality in the back end can definitely be patented. I do lots of IP for— probably 70 or 80% of what I do is patent as software. So yeah, plenty of websites. Early on, I did work for a company that was called PeopleSoft that was bought by Oracle, and almost everything I did for them was website stuff, automatically making a web page ADA compliant, for instance. That was pretty cool. Somebody's asking me about right to use your own— yeah, trade secrets, document them. That will help maintain your rights. Okay. Okay, somebody's asking if I file a provisional application and I let it expire without claiming benefit of it. Years later, can I refile it again? And yes, you can. And I've done that, right? You can— if the end of the year you, you thought you were going to raise money and had this, this great idea and you got sidetracked, right? Yeah, you can refile it. If you file it and it expires without benefit, it's as if it never happened, right? So you can take the same document and refile it a year later or 2 years later or a day later. Yeah. Oh, this is a question about— there's organizations like LOT and AST. I just sold one to one of these. There's organizations among big companies that agree not to assert patents against each other, and They put a pool together and they buy up patents. So I, as I said, last year I sold one of my own to the AST and they promptly let it expire and killed it because they were afraid that I would use it against them. And it was a good deal for both of us. I wasn't gonna sue them. It was a single patent and I wasn't gonna bother with it. You really have to sit down with your patent. If you're going to join one of those entities, it means that you may not be— if you're a startup that someday wants to get bought and you join this entity and all of a sudden it means that a lot of people are going to have rights to use your patents, that really could really damage your valuation. In other words, the acquirer, if you're going to be bought by Facebook or by Samsung, or Broadcom, who knows, you or Apple, you're going to, they're gonna want your IP to be unencumbered. And trolls, and the question goes on to say, will this protect me from trolls? It won't really protect you from trolls. It'll protect you from the other members of the organization. Trolls won't be part of that organization. So they would come at, they don't usually try to come after small companies. They'd rather go after, it's so expensive to sue. Who's going to spend a few million dollars suing— yeah. There's some shakedown artists, but they usually can be handled in better ways. Anyway, I'm moving on. We are— I'm not gaining any traction, and I have 16 more minutes left, so. Can abandoned patent be reactivated? Some cases, if it was accidental and short-term, like, and you can show that it was some sort of mistake, you can. Revive something that's become abandoned. But there has to be a good reason and documentation and excuse. And I've done it, and it's expensive petition. It's expensive. It's like, 10 years ago, it was $1,800 just for the fee because the attorney, not me, right? The attorney had made a mistake and the client had left that attorney and come to me, and I immediately filed a petition to revive the patent with the documentation showing here's the instructions and then the attorney saying messing up and so on. Um, uh, somebody's asking what about what the SM mark is. So an SM mark is a service mark. It's just like a trademark, very similar. It does the same type of thing except that it's directed at a service rather than a product. Okay, somebody's already asking about the international. You can't do it 2 years after your provisional. It's 1 year after the earliest filing date. Oh, it's Mr. Anonymous. I've been told by one of this organization's other lecturers that Mr. Anonymous comes to almost every attendee group. So good to see you. All right. Oh wait, I don't, um, you will, um, so patent attorneys are mostly either focused on litigation. Somebody's asking about patent litigation. Patent attorneys are usually mostly litigators or patent, what's called patent prosecutors, which are like me who get the patent. As I said, I have one litigation case now, and so out of all my work, right, it's the third one that I've— it's 4.5 years old, right? It takes a long time. It's the third one I've done in 20 years, okay, compared to hundreds of patents. You will, if litigation comes up, you— your patent attorney will probably recommend a litigator or work with litigators. I work very closely with patent litigators and we'll work as a team. I'll be the technical side usually because I really understand the technology and they'll be the litigation expert. Okay, the number of questions are growing faster than I'm going. Okay. So somebody's asking about Chinese copycats and knockoffs. There's a way to enforce a patent at the border that's less expensive than a full patent lawsuit, and that's what you would do if you were fighting Chinese copycats and knockoffs with a patent. If you have trademarks and they're trying to copy your goods, and especially if you have your logo on the goods, they're trying to make it look like it's your valuable consumer product. There are a whole bunch of different legal processes for doing that type of stuff, but I won't have time to go into. But yeah, there's, there's, Linda, there, there's things you can do with customs. If a patent attorney— a patent attorney won't do the search, but he will if you want, he will hire somebody who is a professional searcher to do a patent search for you. But it's not worth the money to— a patent attorney shouldn't be spending their time searching because it's expensive, expensive time. Although sometimes I'll get a new client and go, well, wait a second, and then I'll find something. But I won't charge for that. But the inventor should do their own searches. They should get to know what's— as I say, know what's going on in the industry. Okay, the number of questions is going up fast. Okay. There's a question about VCs and investors and who to pitch to and whether you should go for ones that are already in your niche and who might have— I think where this is going is, yeah, there won't be an NDA with an investor. You can assume that they're gonna get your business plan and they're gonna go to their friend who's in that space and say, you know, I got this really interesting one, what do you think of this? And that guy is going to be either the CEO of a competitor or— so it's not— you can't assume— it's not fair either. They'd see 1,000 business plans a year sometimes, some of these guys. There's no way they can sign NDAs, right? They would never. So the thing to do is get some initial patent protection first and then assume they're going to distribute it, right? So get the IP in place before you give that business plan out or so on. Yeah, so the question is if somebody's invested in a company just like you. I wouldn't do it if it was exactly the same, but I'd definitely look for investors in the same space. You can contact me later. I'll tell you more. Here is something where it's— somebody's asking about patenting a method and whether it's the order of steps are different. That's kind of— I'm going to give you the legal answer. It depends. If the order of steps make a real commercial difference and they weren't obvious, maybe you have a chance of a patent. OK. Yes, there's somebody saying, is there a way to prevent other people from getting patented processes if you haven't made a patent on it? Well, you can publish articles and white papers. You don't actually need to do a patent application. You can— you could, and there used to be a way to do that officially, but nowadays you put it up on your company blog. Do a white paper. If you want to prevent— IBM actually has a journal that's internal. They just do that. They publish ideas so that people don't patent them on it. And going down. Cool dictionary. Oh, the Klingon dictionary. Oh my God, I'll look that up. Thank you. All right, I'm going to give you 9 more minutes and then— okay, this looks like another Question there. Somebody says thank you. I appreciate the kudos. If a patent is abandoned before the 20-year limit, in other words, they don't pay the maintenance fees, yes, it goes into the public domain. They could try to revive it within a few months, so don't fully count on that, but in— and, but yeah, if the maintenance fees on a patent aren't paid, it's supposed to go in the public domain. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, oh, I got to the end. Okay, now wait, there's a thing called questions and answers, which is probably 20. Yes, links will be available. So I'm just going to roll through this really quickly. I'll move it here so I'm looking on the same screen. Looks like a lot of you brought these over. So my contact information is there. I will answer questions. Questions. Sometimes I'm swamped, so it may take a day or two. But send me an email and connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd be happy to connect you with other attorneys. And if you have a startup, pitch events. That is— I like judging them. I like winning them. And I like introducing really good startups to investors, because then investors like me. So that's it. Oh, wait, wait, we're almost done here. 23. Yeah, it looks like we covered most of these. You brought them over. Sorry about that. Next time, I will make sure to say where to put this. OK, that's it. Thank you very much all for coming. And in the next few days, I will get the slides and a recording link out to you. Have a good evening. Bye.