The above line, or some similar variant designed to cause a panicked rush, is occasionally seen on TV advert’s late at night. The scheme is a legal scam on the numerous home inventors; it’s designed to get them to pay fees for useless work: along pops Johnny Filing-Clerk, desperate to get away from his current day job, with his Hamster Powered Home Emergency Lighting System, to be told by them that it is a brilliant idea - probably one of the best they’ve ever seen. But he must patent his idea right now - before someone else does. They’ll help in the process of acquiring researching and licensing the patent and will charge very reasonable fees, reasonable that is considering just how much money he is going to make.
The trouble is that the money all goes one way. Not that they are, exactly, dishonest, no, merely not fully truthful. They don’t tell you that most stuff has been patented before, and that very few patents make money and that most are abandoned after a few years because while you may think a hamster powered ‘thingy’ is cool, everyone else knows that you are a fucking idiot. So no-one licences the rights.
So can this all be illustrated? Well yes it can. In the following link an inventors research company which does much the same as that just described has been forced by a court to disclose publicly exactly how much of the money they make comes from their share of the patents they’ve been involved in. If they were hot-shots who always picked winners and gave inventors a truthful picture then, along with the inventors fees paid to the company, there would also be a large royalty share contribution to their corporate revenues from the licence fees paid from third parties for the patent.
The court ordered disclosure demonstrates that they received fees from 157122 customers, all of whom were told a rosy story one imagines. How many of these 157122 made revenue from their patents and therefore had to pay the company a fee?
7.
0.001%
The moral, in the UK, is to go to a chartered patent agent all of whom are honest and give good advice, and avoid US scammers operating get quick rich schemes here.
And you should certainly avoid Geeklawyer.
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