Protecting Your IP - Medical Device Design: Innovation from Concept to Market - page 298

CHAPTER 13
Protecting Your IP
13.1 Introduction
Intellectual property (or IP for short) is a scary concept to most new designers. There is the
constant fear that a “wolf is at the door,” ready to pinch your best ideas and take them for
themselves. Certainly there is a chance that someone will pinch your ideas if you do not
protect them. It is the protected element of your ideas that is intellectual property; if they are
unimportant you would not bother protecting them!
Why protect IP? The first and foremost reason is to ensure that all your effort put into designing
a new idea or device, your costs, and all of your blood, sweat, and tears does not go to waste.
The first patents were granted in about 500 BC in Ancient Greece. It was recognized that
“encouragement was held out to all who should discover any new refinement in luxury,
the profits arising from which were secured to the inventor by patent for the space of
a year.”
( Wikipedia, 2012 )
The philosophy has basically stayed the same. By being granted a patent the inventor has
an effective monopoly for the life of said patent. The first recorded patent was in 1421,
and concerned a floating barge with lifting gear. Presumably the inventor had developed an
advantage over his competitors as he could deliver marble anywhere on the River Arno and
was not bound to places where a crane had been built on the bank. The first UK patent was
granted in 1449, by King Henry VI, and was concerned with the making of colored glass.
This IP was actually brought into the country from outside and hence the patent protected this
inventor's right to produce glass in this way - presumably it had cost him to do this. In those
days international communication was a lengthy process, hence bringing a technology from
somewhere else and establishing it in your own country was, literally, inventive.
The birth of the Industrial Revolution and the creation of wealth based on one's IP led to a
growth in patent applications, and in the type of patent. In the USA over 150,000 patents are
filed per year, and this is growing. My latest GB patent was #2,427,141 in a list that reaches
all the way back to that first one in 1449. In this chapter we shall be looking at how you can
join that list of inventors who have secured their IP so that you, too, have a monopoly. Indeed
we shall also be looking at how to protect your IP with other ingenious devices.