How To Protect Your Ideas

In order to guarantee that no one else can steal your invention idea and make it their own, you would need to PATENT your idea. This is very expensive and time consuming to do, so for the purposes of this project you will send a copy of your idea to yourself through registered mail at the school. If you do not open the letter, it will be time-stamped proof that the idea was yours.

All About Patents

Patent How-To:

According to the government’s Canadian Intellectual Property Office, an invention defined as “patentable” must satisfy three requirements:

• Novelty (Is it the first of its kind?)

• Utility (Does it actually work, and does it prove useful?)

• Ingenuity (Is this a non-obvious improvement or development?)

Canada has a so-called “first to file” system, which essentially makes it so inventors are required to race to the patent office to file their applications, lest someone beat them to the punch.

Strict rules apply to preparing a patent application, though the government’s IP office offers tutorials. An abstract or summary must be included, as well as specification that describes the idea in more detail. Detailed drawings or schematics are often desirable  as well.

A typical filing fee is around $8,000, though more complicated inventions can involve steeper fees into the $15,000 range. Once granted, the patent owner has exclusive rights to exclude others from making, using or selling the invention for 20 years from the filing date.

Beyond Canada

There are geographic limitations to this, though.

Patent rights in Canada only protect the inventor’s rights in that country. One way around this is to pay an additional filing fee, usually around $5,000, to obtain a Patent Cooperation Treaty, which functions like an international application to protect an invention for about 148 countries all at once.

For more information on patent protection, infringement and for how-tos on filing applications, visit the Canadian Intellectual Property Office.