One of the many useful resources provided by the United States Patent and Trademark Office is the new electronic publication InventorsEye.  InventorsEye is a bimonthly publication for the independent inventor community and includes articles and tips directed to issues that impact independent and small entity inventors.

In its first issue, Ronald Jaicks of the Office of the Solicitor, wrote an article entitled Protect Your Innovation: Avoid Scams.  There are numerous horror stories about inventors working with less than reputable invention promotion companies, many lawsuits filed against various scam companies, and the like.  In this article, Jaicks lays out three steps inventors should take before signing up with an invention promotion service.  With the number of inquiries I receive from inventors and clients regarding invention promotion or invention development companies, I believe it is worthwhile for every inventor to follow Jaicks’s advice:

1.  exercise your legal right to receive telling information from companies offering invention promotion services¹;

2.  visit the USPTO’s website for scam prevention to obtain additional information on scam prevention, including a list of published complaints against invention promoters and a link to the Federal Trade Commission’s website where you can learn if a particular company has been investigated or fined; and

3.  search the invention promoter’s name on the Internet and see what turns up.

In my experience, inventors will be best served by doing their homework before dealing with any invention promotion service.  My thanks to InventorsEye for laying out the appropriate plan for inventors to follow to do their research.

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1.  The American Inventors Protection Act of 1999 requires invention promoters to disclose the following information to a customer in writing, prior to entering into a contract for invention promotion services: (1) the total number of inventions it evaluated for commercial potential in the past five years, as well as the number of those inventions that received positive evaluations and the number that received negative evaluations; (2) the total number of customers with whom it contracted in the past five years, not including customers who have purchased trade show services, research, advertising, or other non-marketing services from the invention promoter, or who have defaulted in their payment to the invention promoter; (3) the total number of customers known by it to have received a net financial profit as a direct result of the invention promotion services it provided; (4) the total number of customers it knows to have received license agreements for their inventions as a direct result of the invention promotion services it provided; and (5) the names and addresses of all previous invention promotion companies with which it or its officers have collectively or individually been affiliated in the previous ten years. (see pages 83 and 84 in the linked Act)

Tags: intellectual property, invention promotion, licensing, patent law, uspto