Is your patent valid? If you don’t know, it probably isn’t
By JiNan Glasgow George, CEO of Patent Forecast

Before you can sell your patent for millions of dollars and retire in Malibu, before you can license your patent to a 900-lb. gorilla in Silicon Valley and purchase that Fabergé egg you’ve had your eye on, your patent must be valid. There’s lots of seemingly insignificant ways a patent can be invalidated, so let’s walk through them, so you can be confident that your patent is solid and valuable.

5 ways a patent can be invalidated:
1 – The ownership is wrong
Before anyone will purchase your patent, they have to determine that it belongs to you. Most of the time, it’s a simple process easily documented through a written assignment. However, if one of the listed inventors disputes this assignment, the patent is invalid.
2- The inventors are wrong
Many companies list inventors who had nothing to do with the invention (for instance, the head of R&D) or they list too few. A patent must have the inventors who contributed to each of the claims listed, or else it’s invalid.
3 – The Information Disclosure Statement has issues
Your patent may be ruled invalid if you’ve failed to file the proper information disclosure statement about prior knowledge related to your patent and its patentability. A patent examiner can find some of them for you during the patenting process, but if this list is incomplete, the patent is invalid.
4 – There’s an unpaid maintenance fee
This makes a patent unenforceable, for it will be considered expired.
5 – Failing the Alice 101 test (Software patents)
If your patent has software in it and its validity wasn’t challenged under Alice 101 statutory subject matter, then you probably need to assess that. The good news is, you can narrow your patent and correct any defects, and go through a re-issue process to improve it.

If you’ve passed all the hurdles of proving a patent’s validity, congratulations! You’re well on your way to owning a valuable patent. How valuable? I’ll talk about that in another post.

If you’d like to take the next step towards assessing what your patent is worth, or creating a solid IP portfolio strategy, visit patentforecast.io