Doesn't that depend on who you have disclosed the information to and whether they retrospectively accept some confidentiality?
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10 years ago
Patent cost?
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10 years ago
That's different in the US and the EU, and I can't recall which way around it is.
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10 years ago
IBM ran the US patent database for many years. It wasn't out of the goodnes of their hearts. As the most prolific patent holder, there were several occasions when they took infringers to court, and the infringer would say, sorry I didn't know, and IBM could turn around and say, yes you did - you looked it up on XYZ day. Penalty tripled.
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10 years ago
I've done a couple, but I had the luxury of someone else paying for the patent lawyers, and I vaguely recall they worked out at around $70,000 each for the external lawyers, plus costs of our own in-house patent department lawyers. One of the patents took around 10 years from filing to grant, with various questions going backwards and forwards to the USPO, at the rate of one or two per year. Strangely, the more complex one went through in something like 6 years, IIRC.
I would have to say the external US patent attorney who handled mine was superb, and I can see why they're so expensive.
The patent department at Sun Microsystems would also help staff file patents for things they invented which were nothing to do with work, when they had spare time (although they wouldn't pay for the external patent attorney in this case, obviously). A collegue used this service to file some patents related to guitar amplifiers.