OT Anyone here ever patent something?, where to start? Options

[GaroldShaffer]

With all the different products we have here, I am sure someone has got a patent. Got a few ideas that I think I would like to patent. I have been reading some websites but would like to get some first hand input from someone that has done this process before.

Thanks!

[Mueller]

you could be like our company..."Patent Pending" stickers are pretty cheap (IMG:http://www.914world.com/bbs2/html/emoticons/smile.gif)

We have a few products that we just couldn't justify the cost of a patent, we only sell a few a year and the market is so small that someone would be crazy to knock it off and try to sell them. I can see an end user of the product reproducing it for themselves, but good luck saving any money since only 1 item is usually used at the fabs.

We've also kicked ourselves in the @ss for not spending the 5K to get a patent and have a competitor rip off our design...we've lost about $100K in revenue...nothing we can do about it and if there was, too expenisive to deal with it...oh well is all we can say...

Our company used to specialize in reverse engineering parts (I still do a few small items), we'd check for patents and wouldn't touch anything we knew had a patent. There had a been a few items that I figured out how to make to get around the patent. What is interesting is that most of the time the individual parts didn't have patents, but the assemblies did, so we'd make and sell the parts for the customer to put together......