San Diego Patent Lawyer and Trademark Attorneys from the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson

With over thirty years of experience handling intellectual property matters, with law degrees in both California and in Great Britain, and years of international experience in London as well as decades of experience in California, San Diego intellectual property lawyer Sebastian Gibson brings a wealth of experience to the table.

Sought out to be a writer for California’s two largest and most prestigious legal newspapers, San Diego intellectual property attorney Sebastian Gibson’s articles have been published in the Los Angeles Daily Journal and the San Francisco Daily Journal. Today over 17,000 people visit this website and his blogs monthly for useful advice and thousands more follow him on Twitter for his humor.

San Diego Patent Lawyers provide a wealth of services to clients at the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson. Patent attorneys in San Diego can protect the intellectual property patents of our clients with the expertise and knowledge of a San Diego patent lawye

The Patent and Trademark Office grants patents which are a property right to an inventor. To be patentable, an invention must be novel and non-obvious. What a person cannot patent is a perpetual motion device, abstract idea, a law of nature or any naturally occurring substance or any invention publicly disclosed more than 12 months ago.

A utility patent protects the functionality of an invention. It is granted for any new, useful and non-obvious process, machine, manufactured article, composition of matter, and to new and useful improvements of inventions. A utility patent is good for 20 years from the date of filing, and our law firm's patent attorney can assist you with this process.

A design patent protects the look of an item. It is granted to protect the overall appearance of an invention and is good for 14 years from the date of the issuance of the patent.

A plant patent is utilized to protect a new variety of plant. It is good for 20 years from the date of filing the application, optimally with our California patent law firm's lawyers help.

While a patent granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office protects a patent within the U.S., its territories and possessions, the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) allows a patent applicant to achieve protection of an invention in other Asian and European countries who are signatories of the PCT.

The statutory language used for patents by intellectual property licensing attorneys' states that the right conferred by the patent grant is "the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention in the U.S. or 'importing' it into the U.S." The right granted therefore, and defined by intellectual property licensing lawyers, is the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention, not the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell or import the invention.

Without a patent obtained by the inventor, with or without the help of attorneys, others can make, sell and import your invention, without your permission, and avoid paying you any compensation, royalties or license fees.

To properly apply for and protect your invention, it is advisable that a firm of attorneys first perform a patent search. The California patent lawyers utilized by our law firm from other law firms and our "Of Counsel" attorney can perform this search for you. If after performing this search, a patent licensing attorney or lawyer feels your invention has a chance of receiving a patent, one of the law firm's intellectual property attorneys utilized by our copyright & trademark infringement law firm will then seek to protect your rights by means of the appropriate patent application based upon your budget and goals.

For those clients with a limited budget who wish to quickly protect their rights, a provisional patent application may be appropriate. Though the provisional patent will expire within one year if it is not upgraded to a utility patent, it will give the inventor a priority date while further resources can be gathered to seek additional infringement protection.

Additionally, one of our San Diego patent attorneys can file a Document Disclosure to help prove that you are the originator of an idea on a certain date. However, the Document Disclosure will not give the inventor the priority date that a provisional patent does. The Document Disclosure must be properly filed with the USPTO and is good only if the inventor does not make any public disclosure of the invention.

After one of our San Diego patent lawyers or trusted patent attorneys files a patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, it is usual for at least one Office Action to be issued by the USPTO. That Office Action will commonly reject some of the claims of the patent application. It is necessary at that point to present arguments to the patent examiner why the invention is patentable based upon the differences between the invention and the prior art cited by the examiner. The expertise of San Diego patent and intellectual property licensing attorney Sebastian Gibson can be invaluable in this area.

At the San Diego California Patent, Copyright and Trademark Law Firm of Attorney R. Sebastian Gibson, the California patent attorneys associated with the firm are involved in the licensing of patents and preparation of patent applications for provisional, utility and design patents. Our law firm's San Diego patent attorney can perform patent searches and respond to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Actions, and can additionally assist patent clients in finding manufacturing locations within the U.S. and abroad to produce their goods. For those clients not interested in actually producing their patented items, licensing lawyers such as Sebastian Gibson can assist them in licensing their patents to other manufacturers.

At a time when there is no greater need for breakthroughs in science and medicine, the worldwide patent system is preventing many possible breakthroughs from occurring. Attorney Sebastian Gibson therefore brings you the following information in that debate.

In cities where biotechnology and other medical science is being studied or where research takes place, such as the areas around cities such as San Diego where there are universities or large research projects taking place in California, the U.S. and throughout the world, the worldwide patent laws and patent licensing system is acting as a barrier to research and preventing advances in science and this greatly concerns San Diego patent lawyers.

This is particularly bad news for anyone with major health problems in San Diego or anyone who may suffer from a catastrophic injury anywhere in San Diego from any type of auto, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle or other type of accident.

A relatively new report has come out after a seven year study and confirmed what most patent licensing lawyers and biotechnologists have known for years. The patent system in force worldwide is broken and preventing breakthroughs in science.

Without a means for sharing information, blocking patents are causing delays in developing advances in cancer medicine treatments and in the development of new food crops. So what does this mean for San Diego patent lawyers? And is there anything that San Diego patent attorneys or scientists can do about it?

The report performed by a Canada based partnership cited as examples of medical advances being delayed as those of HIV/Aids drugs and cancer screening tests.

Of concern to scientists is an increasingly bare medicine chest of new life-saving medicines that are critical not just to the developing world but to the industrialized nations as well to address disease. New food crops are also lagging behind that could help address hunger.

And while stem cell researchers apparently patent the most, they collaborate least according to the report.

What happens is that "blocking patents" act as barriers to research and advances in biotechnology that could advance cancer treatment, new medicines and new crops.

When biotech firms race to file a "fortress" of patents around newly discovered genes, research by their competitors is effectively blocked.

Another example given by scientists is work on genes that cause breast cancer in European countries that has been held up by patents held on specific genes by one biotech company in the U.S. With patients in European countries unable to meet the cost of certain cancer screening tests, they have been effectively denied access to such tests.

A recommendation of the report is that companies should be allowed to form "patent pools" where they could cross-license their patented technologies without losing royalties from their patents. It is also recommended that governments develop other public and private partnerships to conduct joint research.

The criticism of the current patenting system is that it acts more as a barrier than as an incentive to research and the development of medical or other biotechnological breakthroughs.

When a patent office grants dangerously broad patents, entirely new areas of research, such as in the field of nanotechnology, can be cut off.

So long as intellectual property and patent laws act as a barrier from others utilizing and expanding upon one scientist’s research, the laws will prevent scientists from making advances that can benefit mankind. This lack of sharing is preventing biotechnology from becoming the field that it once promised. This is where patent attorneys in San Diego can help. Together efforts by Patent Lawyers in San Diego and throughout the U.S. need to band together to ask our leaders in government to change the system to make it more open for scientific and medical research.