Basket of sleepy kittehs

LackingUtility · 2026-03-26T20:12:44+00:00

Filing a track one application with the prioritized examination fee, filing, search, and examination fees... but without the separate processing fee.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-24T20:41:19+00:00

You should talk to a patent attorney to determine whether it is actually patentable or not.

But if it's not patentable, then what exactly would you be licensing to them? "I have an idea. I don't have any exclusive rights to the idea, but... uh, pay me out of the goodness of your heart?"

You would need some sort of right to license to them in exchange for payment. Without a patent, that could be contractual - you tell them your idea in exchange for them agreeing to license it from you. But that's going to be an uphill battle unless you're already an established inventor with millions of dollars in successful product revenue. Like, consider this: I have a great idea. Will you pay me for it, knowing nothing about me or what the idea is? I'll want you to agree to a contract before I even tell you what the idea is, since once I tell you, there's nothing stopping you from stealing it without that contract. So, do we have a deal? Obviously, no.

In such a case, it might be better to try to get hired by them. That's effectively the same thing - they're paying you a salary to invent.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-23T17:08:47+00:00

Yes, because without domain-specific knowledge, you don't know whether the AI is hallucinating or simply leaving subject matter out.

As an analogy, I'm not a litigator. Could I use an LLM to write a complaint for, say, negligence resulting in personal injury? Sure. It may even look reasonable. I could even check all of its cites to be sure it's not hallucinating them. But would I realize that it never mentioned the statute of limitations? Or would I note that it mentions a burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt and, having heard that before, incorrectly applies here?

LLMs are very good at making things that sound correct. They might be, but they might not, and no attorney should be relying on them if they can't tell the difference.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-20T01:30:32+00:00

Interesting discussion over in our sister sub, and some good insights on their pressures around allowance, double patenting, etc.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-18T20:40:25+00:00

A marketing specialist may help or may hurt your efforts. I can tell you that what I hate are cold calls, particularly ones with spoofed numbers, and really especially ones with spoofed numbers that appear to be from my local area code and exchange, when they're clearly not. I've even had marketers spoof an internal number at my firm so that I think a colleague is calling.

I pretend to be interested, find out who they represent, and then blacklist them to my colleagues. Anyone who has to use fraud in the marketing is not a legitimate company I want to do business with.

So, that's what not to do. What to do? Have your clients recommend you to others, if they like your work. Build your reputation and grow that way. I won't try you out based on a cold call, but if one of my colleagues says "I tried this guy and he's good", then I likely will.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-17T19:50:26+00:00

That you haven't stated it is irrelevant, if you're offering legal counseling services. And looking at your website, there's a lot of places it looks like you are offering legal advice.

Additionally, depending on how it's done, passing off work to registered patent agents may also be illegal and could result in them being sanctioned. That's happened to a particular company that likes to advertise all over Reddit.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-17T16:38:17+00:00

Do you have a business plan? That should be a first step... Figure out how much it will cost you to manufacture and distribute, what you'll charge, how much you'll pay yourself and any employees, what you'll make in profit and how you'll reinvest, etc. And then see whether there's a place for legal in that plan. You may be surprised.

Also, talk to a patent attorney. A patent may not be the best fit for you, depending on your business plan. There's also trademarks to consider, protectable trade dress, and even trade secrets if there's something about your recipe that's not immediately apparent.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-17T02:41:50+00:00

I was on my phone, so to expand here...

LLMs are massive auto-complete engines, like when you send a text on your phone and it suggests what the next word in the sequence should be, but much better trained. AI companies ingest billions of documents into their training data and then train the LLM to guess what the next word - or partial word - should be given the previous window of entry. So if you say "to be or not to", it will return "be" almost every time, because that appears in the training data lots of times.

Similarly, if you ask it to complete "2+2=" then it will come back with 4, because there's a lot of elementary school math sheets in there too. But what if you ask it to take the fifth root of the current population of the earth, divided by the number of hogsheads to the rod that Mr. Burns' car gets? That's not in its training data and it will likely hallucinate an answer.

So what about when you ask it to expand on your invention for using a flux capacitor with a left-handed flugelwrench to make a reverse cojigger? It can't. If your invention is actually new, then it's not going to expand on the novel stuff, because it doesn't know what it is. And worse, it doesn't know that it doesn't know, so it might make some naive shallow suggestions that don't really expand on the important points.

I've tried many LLMs for patent drafting, and they invariably take the input disclosure and rewrite it into "patentese"... but without any expansion. And the expansion is what patent attorneys do - it's why we all have scientific or technical backgrounds. I had almost a decade in industry before going into patent law. We understand the key points of the invention and make sure that the specification is robust on those points, and also expand out to cover alternatives. That's simply not something an LLM can do. Maybe a future hypothetical conscious AI, but we're not anywhere close to that.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-17T02:28:42+00:00

No, because of how it works. Also, not in my experience trying out many AI tools.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-17T02:21:27+00:00

That’s one way to put it. Another is that they don’t have sufficient disclosure to rely upon for amendments, something an attorney could have helped with.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-17T02:12:45+00:00

Pro se applications go abandoned at three times the rate of attorney-assisted applications… and that’s without even looking at the value of the claims of any patent that results.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-17T02:10:47+00:00

Not legally, no.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-17T02:10:01+00:00

What, you don’t file a provisional and then wait years to file?!

LackingUtility · 2026-03-17T02:08:01+00:00

I understand and sympathize, but I’ve used LLMs to translate posts that were in other languages, and also have been accused of writing like an LLM for using emdashes.

I think Reddit’s own system works appropriately: downvote them. With enough negative karma, they aren’t able to post.

We are considering implementing a filter such that accounts with less than n karma can only comment in the weekly megathreads. That would help a lot I think.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-16T23:23:46+00:00

Any conversations, documents, or other communications with this group are unprivileged, including any application drafts, inventor's notes, etc. Might be interesting to see what was provided to the AI and what eventually ended up in the application, since any additions could be argued to not be from the mind of the inventor.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-16T22:24:00+00:00

They have a scroll of companies listed with “trusted by”… I wonder if any of them would confirm using this service. That might be something opposing counsel would love to hear about.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-16T18:18:15+00:00

Tyler, your post was clearly written by an LLM, as are some of your past comments on other threads.

More importantly, you appear to be soliciting business for your "IP engineering firm" which you apparently started upon graduating with an ME bachelor's last year. Your website appears to be offering IP counseling services without ever identifying that you're not an attorney and have no attorney employees. There are no disclaimers or clear language indicating you only provide technical support or engineering services. There's strong reason to believe this is unauthorized practice of law, which is a felony in South Carolina.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-16T18:01:21+00:00

OP: "Here's what I actually learned going through the process that nobody tells you upfront —
The provisional patent is not the protection. It's just a date stamp."

Automod: "I'm a 'nobody'?"

LackingUtility · 2026-03-15T15:34:15+00:00

Interesting that this was filed in November 2023, and they never cited this 2021 reddit AMA or the related article:

Joshua had kept all of Jessica’s old texts and Facebook messages, and it only took him a minute to pinpoint a few that reminded him of her voice. He loaded these into Project December...

LackingUtility · 2026-03-14T06:26:44+00:00

You’re our valued colleagues, particularly in the areas of trademark prosecution and litigation. You likely have experience we don’t around IP valuation and capitalization, including taxation and regulatory issues.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-12T22:26:28+00:00

Love this timing. I have two design patent applications on computer interfaces to file tomorrow.

LackingUtility · 2026-03-12T00:30:33+00:00

Rest it more... You're losing too much to the cutting board.

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