Patents take a long time to process and bring considerable costs too (not just at the beginning), but once the process has begun (patent pending) then you have effectively staked your claim at that particular point in time. By my understanding, a patent demonstrates your right to an idea and your rights to defend it, which is all well and good, but if you’re going up against a corporation with a sizable budget who has infringed on your patent, then the chances of you defending your patent without the same money backing you means you’ll probably fail which makes the patent effectively worthless. Infringing a patent is an illegal act, but not a criminal offence like breaching a copyright. It is down to you to bring the matter to civil court and defend it. It is also something that some would like to see changed in the eyes of UK law:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/9130815/Inventor-fury-as-patents-prove-too-costly-to-defend.html

You can apply for IP insurance, but the information out there suggests it can be very expensive if you’re after protection that covers all future legal costs should you go to court for any reason. You should be mindful that if you do require insurance that you purchase it early on before any infringement action takes place. This is known as before the event (BTE) and should in theory be a better pricing than being caught with your pants down and scrambling to find cover at the last possible moment. Early figures I’ve seen are somewhere in the region of £10k just for the insurance, so it all appears to be adding up very quickly and at quite a huge cost too. I’m not going to dwell on this here as I’m not sure if I’ll be able to obtain it directly.

Applying for the patent itself is not costly but getting a patent lawyer involved to word the patent correctly so that it covers the scope of your idea entirely, can be.

I’ve not yet got the design presentation materials together, but I have started enquiring with local patent lawyers about the costs of processing the initial patent application which covers the first 12 months of the process. So far, the best/only offer I’ve seen is £3,000 plus VAT. There is also another search required at a cost of £200 plus VAT, so this stage ends up looking like it would cost nearer £4,000 once the VAT is taken into consideration at 20%. These are hefty sums of money we’re talking about here.
To compare this to the offering from Innovate Design is a little unfair/difficult. Their cost would have been £2,000 inclusive of VAT to process the patent side of things, but the fact that there is that design process means I must call this as £5,000 as the cost of me being able to proceed through them.

So, £5,000 or £4,000? Which one sounds better?
I’ll put this very plainly… neither.

Remember that these costs are just to get past the initial 12-month patent pending application and do not include any insurance, marketing materials or manufacturing of the actual product. That’s a significant dent in anyone’s wallet and makes me wonder how an individual can get their idea to market safely. That kind of money isn’t abundantly available to me, so to proceed down this route as an individual would require a re-mortgage, a bank loan or one hell of a car boot sale. For the sake of a round-up, I’m calling this route ‘Option One – Self funded patent’.

I could of course write the patent and submit it myself which brings the costs down to around the £400 mark, but then there is no guarantee that what I’ve written is accurately covering the entire scope of my product and therefore actually protecting it. If I had to go to court based on my own submission, then I could easily lose. I’m simply not a legal expert, but I’m not an uneducated idiot either.
In my possession are the details on 101 patents with wording related to the field I’m interested in. I’m not saying I copy them verbatim as that’s unacceptable, but there is certainly something to their syntax that I could potentially mimic to create an all-encompassing application. Is this really an option?
Insurance would still be required, but I could maybe get some quotations to see if there are smaller fees available. It at least merits some further investigation which I am labelling as ‘Option Two – Self written patent’. I’ll update you in a future post on the outcome of this.

Let’s put a peg in it there for now.