Protecting your product

G'day my name's Rob Joseph. I'm co-founder of ANTI. I'm also a 22 year old old final year medical engineering student here at QUT. At ANTI we're building a beanie that's as safe has a helmet. So it's soft, malleable, and the best bit of all protective. It's for the snowsports market, as people can be still be protected and safe, while going down the mountain, but still feeling really comfortable and looking pretty cool at the same time.

We realized we needed a patent through my experience in medical engineering, part of the course is learning about patents and knowing how they work, and it is a physical product of course, and so the best way of protecting a physical product that you can see is a patent. We went to a couple of different patent attorneys, and went around had some meetings with those guys, and so we we also googled a lot; we've learned a lot of information online, and then we had some meetings with patent attorneys and we realized that provisional patent was the best thing for our situation at the time.

So the process of the patent is is a relatively long winded one, I suppose, so initially it's not particularly difficult you go to a patent attorney we found one that we both really liked and got our our idea really well, and so we engaged him he wrote up a patent application, and with a bit of back and forth we got the patent in the way that we liked and we submitted a provisional patent from this point that allows us 12 months worth of protection which is unpublished.

From there we need to extend that, either by national patents or PCT which allows us another 18 months worth of protection under that treaty and then we can go global but then we'd have to pay for our patents in every single country. The PCT is a lot cheaper and allows us a little bit longer in terms of not needing to pay those upfront costs.

We were really careful throughout the process early on particularly to document everything we do. Luckily in my co-founder he's really good at that kind of thing. We both bought big notebooks and filled them all up pretty quickly. Dated every page, scanned them all into the computer. Have a digital copy as well. We were really careful about what we said publicly as well. In the early stages we couldn't afford a patent so we had to be really careful about what we disclose publicly, and for a lot of it we just spent a lot of time making sure we document it and not putting in the wrong place, and keeping a good hold of exactly what we're doing when we did it. There's lots of big markets, and of course we want to hit our first one which is snow. It's a massive market; 1.1 million helmets sold in America alone each year. So it's a great market to be in, it's a lot of fun, really grassroots, so once we get a good stronghold there, it's it's a great place to be, and we love snowboarding too so it works. But there's also a lot of cycling. Cycling and recreational BMX mountain biking. Skating as well, there's a big market there, and a few different medical markets and there's even a bit of a chance for a military market there as well, so there's lots of different opportunities that we have with the same technology.

Rob just told us about the process he went through in applying for a patent over his invention. The first important thing he said, was that prior to the application, he kept his invention secret. This is important because patents will only protect new inventions. This is known as the requirement of novelty. If the invention is not new it cannot be protected, so secrecy prior to the application is really important. Even though Rob kept the invention secret, he and his partner were careful to document the process of developing the invention though, and that is also important. Documenting that and having regular conversations with your collaborators about who owns what and who has contributed what, will make things much easier later on when you apply for IP protection and when you are managing IP protection.

The other thing that Rob mentioned, was applying for a patent through the PCT. PCT, stands for patent cooperation treaty. Patent applications are by country only. So if you apply for a patent in Australia, you only have protection for your invention in Australia. If your market is global, just as Rob's is, Rob's market is really anywhere where there is snow, then you need to think about applying for patents in other countries. Applying country by country can be time-consuming and expensive, so the patent cooperation treaty is an agreement between all the countries to essentially streamline that process. It lets you put in one application through the treaty, and nominate which countries you want protection in, and that makes the whole process of applying for international patent protection much easier. So for you if you're thinking about applying for a patent, remember up into application be careful about the secrecy of your invention, and you'll also need to think about your market; where do you want protection for your invention, because that will dictate where you apply for patents.