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Rich Goldstein is a trilogy of skills with engineering, patent attorney and marketing providing a fully rounded view for the Amazon seller. He understands the product features and manufacturing, the power of the patent in Amazon and the marketability aspects of IP and patents for the product.
- Electrical engineer and patent attorney for 25 years
- 2,000 patents for clients
- Running his own practice since graduating law school
- Been a business owner and marketer
- Used to market in yellow pages before internet marketing
Utility and Design Patent
- Utility is a conventional view of patents – a new idea or improvement on a product
- Protects those functional or structural differences
- Design patent is for the ornamental appearance of a product
- Were conventionally limited in their scope and purpose as protecting an appearance
- Utility patents are considered more valuable
- This was conventional wisdom until Amazon
Design Patents and Amazon
- If you have a design patent
- And a competitor knock off your product
- You do an IP infringement complaint with Amazon
- Send a copy of your design patent saying they infringe
- Amazon will shutdown their listing
- Utility patents are more difficult to interpret than a design patent for infringement
- Amazon does not go into the depth of these and so don’t get it
Bad Actors using patents infringements
- Some Sellers are using this problem of understanding to take people out by falsely claiming IP infringement
- Design patents can be used unfairly – yes the products look the same but only because their features are from 50 year old design rather than the product (i.e. 2 chairs)
- You have to look at what came before and the infringement can’t be about things that existed before
- Have to dig deeper and look at the patents that came before and compare the competitors patent to previous patents
Steps to take
- First, look up the patent – go to Google Patents patents.google.com
- Type in the patent number
- Look for when the application was filed because it may be after your product was listed so not possible to infringe
- See other patents listed that came before (patent citations) and click through those other patents that were considered when the patent was being granted
- You might see an example of a product 50 years ago, might be in an expired patent – you can then show that your design is old and can’t be infringing
- Danny cannot cope with this and gives it straight to a professional
Book – Consumer Guide to Obtaining a Patent
- American Bar Assoc. asked Rich to write a book on how patents work
- Broken down into plain english
- Is available on Amazon ABA Consumer guide to obtaining a patent
- Read it and be in the 99th Percentile of AMazon Sellers with knowledge about patents
Is the Patent Marketable?
- Is the thing you’re able to patent – is it overall marketable?
- Research and see that some details do make it distinct and maybe patentable
- But those things that make it patentable do they make it marketable – will it help attract people
- Often people go into the patent process and rely too much on the details that won’t have an impact on the market – is it something your customers are going to care about?
Utility v’s Design Patent usage
- Utility patent
- Fantastic for protecting things in the World
- Design patent
- Ideal for Amazon and a no-brainer as they defer to design patent owners
- Less expensive to get design patent than utility
