What Is Patent?

Patents are official documents you can use to prove that you invented something. They're like a license to have total ownership of your idea, and you can use them to ensure nobody steals it! Well, now you know why knowing this is very important! The government gives you a patent for inventing something, but only for a limited time. You have to show them proof that it's unique so that nobody else can claim it as their own. Patents are suitable for all kinds of things—but most commonly, they're used for protecting inventions in technology fields. So if you have an opinion on something new in engineering or electronics technology (like an app), getting a patent on it will help protect your idea from being stolen by other companies who want to use it without paying you anything. In the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's (USPTO) history, patents were only granted for "methods of doing business" from 1790 until the mid-1970s. Then, they changed: they decided that "methods of doing business" are inherently not patentable. This was because they considered these methods abstract ideas and, therefore, not protectable by patent law. However, many applications emerged on the Internet or computer-implemented methods of commerce, which caused the USPTO to reconsider its stance. They concluded that these inventions were technological rather than business ones, allowing them to be patented under current law. The U.S. patent office needs clarification about whether a business method is patentable. For many years, they would determine if the invention was patentable based on the exact statutory requirement of any other invention. By 2001, the USPTO decided that a business method invention only had to be carried out on the computer to be patentable. In other words, they're still figuring it out!