Patent

Gumbyman

Howdy,

Not sure if this is the right place but could anybody tell me if it is possible to patent an idea for a website that does a very specific thing?

Sorry if this appears vague but you may guess I'm afraid to give too much away

Thanks,
Gumby.

mountainyman

Hi Gumby,
This is not legal advice which could only be offered by a practising patent agent or intellectual property lawyer.

First you should ring up the Patent information centre in Dublin or the Patent office in Kilkenny.

Generally a patent must be [1] novel [2] involve an inventive step [3]be capable of industrial application

aidan_walsh

It is not possible to patent an idea, only an implementation.

Saruman

I would be shocked if you had an idea sho radical that there are not already thousands of websites out there doing the same thing.

If you can patent websites that did a very specific thing then youtube and could have put through a patent preventing other similar sites. Same goes with whoever the first social networking site was.

Gumbyman

Thanks for the replies guys. Will get onto the patent office. Worth a shot anyway. All they can do is say no.

Saruman I'm a little bit surprised by your first comment. Reminds me of somebody I heard saying that all the good music has already been written. All the innovation that could possibly be dreamt of has already been done. All the note combinations have been exhausted. I couldn't disagree more. But yeah, I'm doubtful about the patent prospects none the less.

Thanks again folks!

Gumby.

haz

Saruman wrote: »

If you can patent websites that did a very specific thing then youtube and could have put through a patent preventing other similar sites.

Amazon have spent a great deal of money defending their One-click patent. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg is being sued by his former Harvard classmates. EBay and Google are suing one another over classified advertising techniques.

Here is a patent for the toolbar you might well have just below your web browser's address bar: http://www.google.com/patents?id=xBB_AAAAEBAJ&dq=google

Pines

Gumbyman wrote: »

Thanks for the replies guys. Will get onto the patent office. Worth a shot anyway. All they can do is say no.

They almost certainly will say no, and they may well be wrong. My advice is don't rely on the Patents Office for advice on patentability. Speak to a patent attorney who specialises in software-related inventions. While the analogy is far from perfect, if you were accused of a crime, nobody on this board would advise you to ring the Gardai for advice rather than a solicitor. In both cases the choice is between a conservative civil servant who doesn't have proper training and a professional who does.

(I should declare a conflict here: I'm a patent attorney who has seen several inventors in the software field given bad advice by the Patents Office, but by the time they come for proper advice, the invention has been disclosed and it is then too late to protect what would have been a perfectly good invention.)

The advice given by the Irish Patents Office is very conservative in this area, and they will typically say something inaccurate or misleading along the lines that "no patents are available for computer programs" despite the fact that the European Patent Office issues thousands of patents having effect in Ireland covering software- and website-related inventions every year.

Even if it's not patentable in Europe, it may be patentable in the US and that may be a bigger market.

Gumbyman

Thanks man! That's very interesting.