Provisional Patent or Non-provisional Patent Application Which Should You Choose?
It’s important that when talking with anyone about your idea, that they understand that any improvements that result from the conversation belong to you and your concept alone. Even if they themselves improve the idea, chances are it would never have happened if you didn’t initiate the conversation around your idea. I would bounce this off of the attorney as well.
Provisional’s do have features that you must watch out for. You can’t protect an invention with a provisional patent. So you can’t sue an infringer. Your provisional is kept secret until after you convert it to a utility patent. Your provisional will end in just one year. If you haven’t filed for a utility patent claiming priority to the provisional within 12 months, your application has no value. But for many inventors, 12 months is long enough to know if the idea is viable. Read more about provisionals at the provisional patent page at the USPTO web site.
Each one of us wants our rights and interests to be respected and protected against illegal claims. It is the task of the government to see to it that our individual rights and interests are not violated. However, it is our responsibility to convey to the government the fact that a particular idea, product, or innovation is our invention and hence needs to be protected.
In the past, significant inventions and ideas have been stolen from their rightful owners due to the absence of any such right or provision that could protect or solidify the rights of the bearer. It was in the wake of such crimes of infringements that the provisional patent was introduced. United States of America was one of the first nations to bring such a patent into existence.
While patent attorneys often speak of “converting” a provisional into a non-provisional, this is not usually an accurate description of the case (with a single exception), since the provisional has no life beyond its twelve-month term and “converting” is usually done by filing a non-provisional application that claims benefit of the filing date of the provisional. Thus, the provisional is primarily a means for delaying the filing of a non-provisional patent application, while still getting benefit of the earlier filing date of the provisional. (The single exception as to “converting” is that a provisional patent application can be truly converted with an extra processing fee if it has a least one claim, or is amended to contain at least one claim, but this process is rarely done, since now the term of the resulting non-provisional will be twenty years from the date of the provisional filing, thereby losing a year.)
Lastly, a provisional patent application never sees the light of day and remains confidential, unless a non-provisional patent application (or a Patent Cooperation Treaty application — to preserve foreign filing rights — or a design application) takes priority to it.
For more information on provisional patent applications & Non provisional patent applications, see Provisional and Non Provisional pages of our website (https://www.thepatentoffice.com
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