Have you ever presented your ideas at a conference or tradeshow? Conferences can bring great exposure to your company and its ideas, helping you get leads and sales. But, if not done carefully, it could also cause some serious unintended consequences.

Jeopardizing Patent Rights

At conferences and tradeshows, people commonly present their ideas in a variety of ways—perhaps by describing them in brochures, displaying them on poster boards, or informally chatting with another person. These activities can sometimes amount to a disclosure that jeopardizes your rights to profit from those ideas. Being able to file and obtain a patent on those ideas is what gives you that right and the right to keep others from using your idea for their own benefit.

Under U.S. patent law, once you make certain types of disclosures, you have one year from the date of disclosure to file a patent application on that idea. If you fail to do so, you will forever lose your patent rights to that idea. Also, while the U.S. provides this one-year grace period to file an application, most foreign countries do not. In those countries, if you make certain disclosures any time and in any location before filing a patent application, you will lose your patent rights.

Protecting Patent Rights

The most prudent way to protect your patent rights in all countries is to file a patent application on your idea before attending a conference and making any type of disclosure. This will preserve your global patent rights and you can then freely present or market those ideas in any desired fashion.

If you are unable to file an application before attending a conference, you may be able to create a poster presentation, product brochure or the like that alludes generally to the inventive subject matter without disclosing what the invention is. A good idea is to have your presentation materials reviewed by your patent counsel prior to presenting them to make sure that no inventions are disclosed.

Does this seem like overkill to you? Well, think again. If you protect your idea, you get the following advantages, just to name a few:
You can exclude your competitors from practicing your invention. If a competitor practices your invention without your permission, you can sue that competitor for patent infringement and collect significant damage awards and/or receive an injunction stopping the competitor. Your patent can prevent or deter your competitors from entering a market, enabling you to obtain a legal monopoly of that market.
You can use your patent as a business tool to attract investors and potential customers to your company. Investors often question whether a company’s technology is patented and potential customers often find patented products or services more attractive. You can use your patent as a revenue generator. If a competitor, business partner, or any third party wishes to practice your invention, you can require them to obtain a license to your patent rights in order to do so. A license enables you to collect royalties on the third party’s practice of your invention.

If you don’t protect it, guess what? You get none of these rights and a competitor can use your idea for their own business and there would be nothing you can do to stop them. You will need to figure out a good balance between talking about your idea to get people interested in buying from you and not revealing so much that they have no need to buy from you.