Patent your inventions

A patent protects an invention – a technical solution that meets three conditions at once: it is new (not previously made available to the public anywhere), it involves an inventive step (it is not obvious to a person skilled in the art), and it is industrially applicable. You cannot patent a mere business idea, a scientific discovery, or a mathematical method. The key practical rule: keep your solution secret until the filing date, because your own earlier disclosure usually destroys novelty.

A utility model protects a new, useful technical solution concerning the shape or construction of an object of fixed physical form – in practice a specific product, not a method, a substance, or a computer program. The key difference: a utility model does not need to involve an inventive step, so it can be obtained even for simple or "obvious" solutions. Protection lasts 10 years (a patent – 20 years), and the procedure is usually faster and cheaper. Utility models are available in Poland and many other countries, but they are not granted by the EPO or the USPTO.

In Europe and in Poland – usually not. Any public disclosure before the filing date – a sale, an online description, a trade fair presentation, or a scientific publication – destroys novelty and closes the path to a patent. The exceptions are very narrow (e.g. disclosure resulting from an abuse against the applicant). The US is different: it has a 12-month grace period for your own disclosure. The safe rule is simple: file first, launch later.

A patent lasts a maximum of 20 years from the filing date, provided you pay the renewal fees on time. In Poland, fees are paid for consecutive protection periods and increase every year – from around EUR 100 at the start to over EUR 250 in the final years. If you miss a payment, the patent lapses. In the US, instead of annual fees, three maintenance fees are due (about 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years after grant). For a European patent, renewal fees are paid to the EPO first and, after grant, in each country where you keep the patent in force.

A patent gives you the right to prohibit others from commercially using your invention – making, selling, or importing it – in a specific territory. It is a right to "exclude", not a guarantee that you can freely sell the product yourself (other parties' patents may stand in your way). There is no single "worldwide" patent: protection applies only where you actually obtain it. You can take the national route (UPRP), the European route (EPO), or file an international PCT application, which simplifies the procedure but is not itself a patent.

In short: you file an application (description, claims, drawings), the office gives it a filing date and number, draws up a search report, and publishes the application after 18 months. The office then examines whether the solution is new, non-obvious, and industrially applicable – at this stage, it often exchanges letters with the applicant. If everything is in order, a decision to grant the patent is issued (after payment of the fee). The whole procedure usually takes 2 to 5 years.

Formally, yes – applicants from Poland can act on their own (a representative, i.e. a patent attorney, is mandatory for applicants from outside Poland, among others). In practice, we advise against it for important solutions. The scope of protection is defined by the claims, not the description, and after filing you can no longer broaden what you have disclosed – an early mistake stays with you for years. A poorly drafted patent can be easy to design around, or it may protect something that cannot be enforced. It is well-drafted claims that determine the real value of a patent.

Yes, in many cases you can. A computer program "as such" is excluded from patentability, but it can be patented if it solves a technical problem and produces a technical effect. The same applies to artificial intelligence – what counts is the technical effect, and the inventor must be a human, not the AI system itself. The European Patent Office (EPO) grants thousands of software patents every year.

This is one of the more important decisions, and it depends on the specific solution. A patent requires full disclosure of the invention in exchange for 20 years of exclusivity – after that, the technology enters the public domain. A trade secret requires no disclosure and can last indefinitely (the classic example is the Coca-Cola recipe), but it fails once someone independently comes up with the same idea or reverse-engineers your product. As a rule of thumb: if infringement is easy to detect in a competitor's product – patent; if the solution stays hidden and is hard to reproduce – a trade secret is often the better choice.

No – a patent makes sense only if it can actually be enforced. Three things are worth checking: whether you can detect that a competitor is using your invention (an algorithm hidden on someone else's server can be undetectable); whether the infringer would be a competitor you are willing to sue, rather than your own customer; and whether the patent could be easily designed around with a minor change. If any of these answers is unfavorable, consider another form of protection. That is why a well-drafted patent protects the benefit delivered to the customer, not just one specific embodiment – which makes it hard to design around.