Patent costs

The costs of filing and maintaining a patent vary, of course, from country to country and depend on the complexity of any particular case. Thus, only a few examples and estimates will be given below. 

Applications for a national patent or at the International Patent Office may cost up to an equivalent of US 3,000 per application for a search report and the examination. A similar amount can be assumed for the involvement of a patent attorney as long as only formalities are concerned. Creative work by a patent attorney office (e.g. formulation of the claim or of defending statements) as well as translations result in the extra cost of about US 100-300 equivalent per hour, depending on the qualification of the person who deals with it. Thus, the effective cost of the patent application may rise up to US 8,000-10,000 per country. Annuities for a national patent are raised as a constant rate per year or increase during the life-span of a patent. The figure of US 100-300 per year and country (or per patent certificate from international patent organizations) may serve as a clue for what must be expected. 

Patent office fees may be reduced to 50 or 60% of the normal fee, if the applicant agrees to a license of right notation, in which case everyone may obtain a license to exploit the patent. If no agreement can be found with the patentee on the terms of such a license, the terms will be set by the court. 

While the above-mentioned estimates assume that the patenting process is rather straightforward, considerable expenses must be anticipated if an opposition has been filed, or if an interference is to be expected in the USA. Due to the complicated procedure, especially of a US patent interference, several ten or hundred thousand dollars are spent readily and the entire cost of an interference procedure may well 

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Miscellaneous Direct Costs Estimates for the cost of maintenance and repairs, operating supplies, royalties, and patents are best based on company records for similar processes. A rough average value for the annual cost of maintenance is 6 percent of the capital cost of the plant. This percentage can vaiy from 2 to 10 percent, depending on the severity of plant operation. Approximately half of the maintenance costs are for materials and half for labor. Royalty and patents costs are in the order of 1 to 5 percent of the sales price of the product. 

A final word on the value of patents. A patent can greatly increase the value of a business. So when starting a business there are good reasons to try to patent the essential parts. However, a patent on its own - without a business - is seldom worth much. Most patents cost money. Most firms need patents to keep on working. They may use them to have a position in negotiations. They may licence (part of) their patents. Only a few firms, mainly development ones, regard patents as core business. 

In the absence of adequate support to file and defend patents, individuals or institutes may decide to approach companies with the aim of licensing the invention. This is often done already before the draft stage of a patent application. The invention as a whole may be offered to the company, in which case the company may act as applicant or licensee of the patent and will request exclusive exploitation rights in exchange for the payment of patenting costs and for later royalties. 

Cost. Pesticides (including herbicides, fungicides and insecticides) are expensive when they are first marketed, partly to cover the very high developmerrt costs. Once they are off patent costs usually fall. Cost can significarrtly affect product choice and rate used, especially if crop prices are low. 

We have not indicated the reagents employed in the reactions by which ethylene and propene are converted to the compounds shown Because of patent requirements different companies often use different processes Although the processes may be different they share the common characteristic of being extremely efficient The industrial chemist faces the challenge of producing valuable materials at low cost Success in the industrial environment re quires both an understanding of chemistry and an... 

While the principal value of the book is for the professional chemist or student of chemistry, it should also be of value to many people not especially educated as chemists. Workers in the natural sciences—physicists, mineralogists, biologists, pharmacists, engineers, patent attorneys, and librarians—are often called upon to solve problems dealing with the properties of chemical products or materials of construction. Eor such needs this compilation supplies helpful information and will serve not only as an economical substitute for the costly accumulation of a large library of monographs on specialized subjects, but also as a means of conserving the time required to search for... 

The three main sources of competitive advantage in the manufacture of high value protein products are first to market, high product quaUty, and low cost (3). The first company to market a new protein biopharmaceutical, and the first to gain patent protection, enjoys a substantial advantage. The second company to enter the market may find itself enjoying only one-tenth of the sales. In the absence of patent protection, product differentiation becomes very important. Differentiation reflects a product that is purer, more active, or has a greater lot-to-lot consistency. 

The first criterion was associated with improved secondary and tertiary petroleum recovery processes. This is the justification for the patent appHcations issued to the Dow (50) and Exxon (51) corporations. The additional costs of production and the increased adsorption of such modified water-soluble polymers are detrimental to the commercial appHcation of such polymers and even the academic studies in this area have decreased in recent years. 

Other acetyl chloride preparations include the reaction of acetic acid and chlorinated ethylenes in the presence of ferric chloride [7705-08-0] (29) a combination of ben2yl chloride [100-44-7] and acetic acid at 85% yield (30) conversion of ethyUdene dichloride, in 91% yield (31) and decomposition of ethyl acetate [141-78-6] by the action of phosgene [75-44-5] producing also ethyl chloride [75-00-3] (32). The expense of raw material and capital cost of plant probably make this last route prohibitive. Chlorination of acetic acid to monochloroacetic acid [79-11-8] also generates acetyl chloride as a by-product (33). Because acetyl chloride is cosdy to recover, it is usually recycled to be converted into monochloroacetic acid. A salvage method in which the mixture of HCl and acetyl chloride is scmbbed with H2SO4 to form acetyl sulfate has been patented (33). 

The Certificate of Correction. Another mechanism for correcting the patent is the "Certificate of Correction," which is essentially a petition filed by the patentee to correct minor errors in the patent produced either by the U.S. PTO or inadvertentiy by the appHcant. Unlike the Notice of Errors, a Certificate of Correction does result in an additional pubHcation from the U.S. PTO, and anyone requesting a copy of a patent in which a Certificate of Correction has been filed will also obtain the Certificate of Correction. A Certificate of Correction reflects amendments made during the examination of the patent which were entered by the examiner but not found within the issued patent. The omission of such amendments can be in the body of the patent or in the patent claims. The Certificate of Correction may also be used to correct errors in the issued patent which were not present in the patent appHcation when it was filed. If the error was caused by the patent appHcant prior to or during examination, the patent appHcant bears the cost of filing and... 

Payment of maintenance fees is required at the fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-year anniversaries of the date of issuance of the patent. The costs of these maintenance fees vary from year to year depending on the regulations of the U.S. PTO. The first maintenance fee tends to be fairly slight, allowing for the further enforcement of the patent with Htde economic burden on the patentee. The second maintenance fee tends to increase the payment from the first maintenance fee by a factor of two. The third maintenance fee tends to be substantial, increasing the payment from the first maintenance fee by a factor of three. 

Documentation abstracts, useful as they are, may also prove inadequate for final decisions, which would make it necessary for the searcher to obtain and examine copies of full patent specifications. Although the increasing availabihty of sets of full specifications on CD-ROM at modest cost is making it easier for searchers to have in their collections copies of those specifications they might need to consult, the necessity to go beyond computer output, whether to abstracts or full specifications, is stiU one of the bottlenecks of computer searching, and therefore an area in which significant new developments are hoped for. 

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