Patent Law

I attended a seminar this Tuesday at the University of Toronto Mississauga Campus. It was the 10th session of the “Growing your business” breakfast series presented by OCETA and the R.I.C. Centre. This final session of the season was an “Innovator Idol” session, and the session was sold out!

Four emerging companies needing financing got the opportunity to present their pitch to a panel of industry experts and investors. The four presenters were:

• Thoughtspeed providing a web-based supply chain integration solution for health care,
• idAlerts providing an identity theft protection and credit management tool,
• Realtech having developed a cutting-edge line of water quality test instrumentation, and
• Refined Data providing a software application which provides easy access to environmental and OHS management information.

All four companies made terrific presentations, all having market potential and viability, but only one could win.

The winner was Realtech Inc. with their cutting-edge water quality testing instruments, capable of on-site testing and monitoring, bringing the current lab-test turnaround time of days down to minutes. Realtech has ensured that their product line is protected by patents or patent applications, even though cash was limited at the time of starting up.

And this is crucial for any technology based start-up. You may want to consider using a patent consultant outside of Toronto downtown as these are often less expensive. However, you must file the first patent application(s) before you start talking to investors and partners to protect your intellectual property.

Camilla Nielsen
Intellectual Property Consultant

My LinkedIn profile

CNI – intellectual property consulting focuses on small and medium sized businesses as well as universities. At CNI – intellectual property consulting, we work with the inventors to turn their invention into a formal patent application. Through a network of associates, we handle applications all over the world incl. Canada, USA, Europe and China.

Founder is Camilla Nielsen having more than 12 years experience in intellectual property rights. She has a scientific background in applied physics and electronics and is a qualified European Patent Attorney.

CNI – intellectual property consulting assist companies and universities with identifying inventions, assessing invention disclosures for both patentability and marketability, and draft and prosecute patent applications. We teach and train all groups of people from researchers, engineers and professionals to administrative personnel to educate them about Intellectual Property Rights and to raise the awareness on this topic.

We care about your inventions.

Camilla Nielsen

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/camillanielsen

Website: www.cniconsult.com

I had a meeting with an inventor the other day. He had made a great invention enhancing the look and feel of web pages. He had been working on it for more than a year, the software code was now fine tuned and he had a very positive feedback from his clients. We discussed his idea and the possible ways of obtaining protection for it.

During the discussions, he told us that he had been selling this new software for a couple of months; he had presented the software, including every detail, to his clients. In the patent world we say that he had made his invention public, he had disclosed his idea to the world. You might ask what impact this could possibly have on the patent process – but the fact is that in most of the world your invention has to be new for you to get a patent – and if you have already published it yourself, it is not regarded as “new” any longer and you will not get a patent!

We were able to help him though, but only in the United States and Canada. These are some of the few countries where you are allowed to publish or show your own invention before you file an application for patent. You just have to make sure that you file a patent application in each of these countries within a year from the date you first showed it to anyone.

In the rest of the world, however, he cannot get any patents for this invention because he came to us too late in the process!

The moral of the story is: Your Patent Agent should be the first to know your grand idea. Call us today! No obligations – the first meeting is offered free of charge.