AboutPenny Ballou Expertise The Invention Process; Royalties; Licensing Inventions/Products; Pricing; Direct to Market; Marketing/Promotions; Patent Searching; DIY patent writing; Types of patents/costs/how to's; Funding (grants and Angel investors); Prototyping; Off-Shore sourcing.
Experience I am founder of an inventors group; Advisory Board President of www.inventored.org; former Licensing Executive Society member; researcher for www.piausa.org and a consultant; plus moderate and contribute to several online inventor discussion groups.
Publications Enter my email address into any search engine to find them.
Education/Credentials Invention development: well-studied and applied in all aspects of the process and an inventor myself with one invention in patent pending and others ramping up. Lived and attended schools in Mainland China and the UK.
Question QUESTION: Say I use an automatic software program to generate possible new configurations of some item like an airplane wing or a lawnmower blade, and then the software automatically tests it in a simulation. If the software then discovers a new configuration that's different and much better that the current state of the art, can I patent what the software invented?
ANSWER: Hi Dave,
The answer is maybe and maybe not. First you do a preliminary patent search at www.google.com/patents to see what you can find.
Since it's a software configuration your best bet is to order a patent search with a written legal opinion as the configuration may be listed in an existing patent and may be not. Also, patenting software is tricky business as there are strict rules about it. Many use Copyright.
Go to www.uspto.gov navigate to their Inventor Resource Center pages to read the rules re software. Also, go to www.loc.gov to read the rules found on the Copyright website about copy writing software.
Regards,
Penny Ballou
---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------
QUESTION: But if it's truly new, there's nothing stopping me from patenting what the software invented for me?
Answer Hi again,
I am not an attorney so anything I write not linked to the patent office as source to support it is my personal viewpoint so cannot be relied upon. Many but not all patent attoreys (in your case only those specializing in software and not the mechanical arts) offer a free consultation. Take advantage of it.
If it meets the patent office's criteria for what is patentable in the software field and were it able to overcome objections from an Examiner the answer could be "yes" but that is up to the patent office.
