Patent Engineering in a Global Economy

• Author: Donald S. Rimai
• Profession: Recently retired from Eastman Kodak, where he worked as a researcher and intellectual property manager in digital printing and adhesion science
• Pages: 153-167

153

 us far in this book we have discussed the  rst three key steps in the

patent engineering process—identifying important problems, mapping a

portfolio of patents to “own the problem s” and e ciently generating these

patent applications .  ese steps de ne what patents you want to  le. Now

that you have decided what to  le , you have to decide where to  le , and

why. As you are about to discover, these decisions can be among the most

time consuming and potentially expensive decisions that you will face in

the patent engineering process.

No patent will block your competitors around the entire world. While

there is an international patent application , there is no international pat-

ent.  e most any one patent will cover is a group of closely related coun-

tries, such as the 38 member countries participating in the European

Patent Convention [1].  ere is also the African Regional Intellectual

Property Organization [2] (ARIPO ) consisting of 19 African countries and

the Gulf Cooperation Council Patent O ce [3] (GCCPO ) consisting of

6 Gulf states . A “jurisdiction ” is the geographical reach of any particular

9

Patent Engineering in a Global

Economy