patentI have worked on something a developed intellectual property. Anyhow, I do not have a patent as it takes a lot of time and money, especially international patents.
Is it possible for me to contact a company to whom I want to sell the intellectual property too, and sell it to them without having a patent on it?
First, you will need to protect your IP (intellectual property). There are a couple of free options for doing this: if it is text, e.g. code or prose, then you can effectively copyright it by simply stating that the document is copyrighted. If it is know-how, i.e. the knowledge on how to do something; or a design, e.g. for a better mousetrap; then in advance of communicating information about your IP to them you will need to get an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) in place.
Once you have protected your IP, you could then set-up a license for your partner to use the IP or sell the rights to the IP to them.
Regardless of what IP and agreements are in place, being pragmatic with a partner you trust is likely to be the most successful way forwards for you as you may not be in a position to go through the process of enforcing your IP rights.
You don’t need a patent to sell IP. However, anyone you tell could then do what you are doing unless you get them to sign a non-compete/non-disclosure agreement.
However, I wouldn’t always bank on those holding up since you would have to prove that they told someone. So maybe the company you pitch it to does nothing with it, but then one of the guys at the company tells his buddy about the great idea.
Now how do you prove he told his friend if he didn’t text/email his friend and neither party confesses…you can’t. You might be able to fight it in court and say their product is so similar to yours that it would be impossible for them not to have disclosed your idea, but who knows if that will pan out.
I have know several companies who did not patent their product/whatever because they didn’t want others to know about it. Because once you patent an IP, then everyone knows what your bright idea is since it is now published and all someone has to do is make some small change and now they have their own IP which is a near rip off of yours…but legally they can do whatever they want with that now.
This is why a good patent lawyer pays off because they know how to use the right terminology so that it makes it very difficult for someone to rip off your product/idea.
For example, if you had a product that used a screw to secure something, a lawyer would describe the screw in the patent as a fastener.
That way if someone tried to replace your screw with a nail, tape, glue, whatever. Then you would be covered.
So that is the good and the bad of patenting your IP.
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.