do you patent your work?

Question: do you patent your work?
- Keywords:
  law,
  patent,
  work
Asked by daviesl3 to Amit, Emily, Joanne, Martin, Paige on 20 Mar 2012.
- Joanne Davies answered on 20 Mar 2012:
  
  I don’t own any patents but usually inventions are patented.
  
  I also work with patent databases by performing searches to check on our competitor’s inventions.
  
  Here’s a link to the Intellectual Property Office so you can have a look for yourself at different types of IP (Intellectual Property) . http://www.ipo.gov.uk/
  
  From the following link you can do a worldwide patent search http://gb.espacenet.com/search97cgi/s97_cgi.exe?Action=FormGen&Template=gb/en/quick.hts
  
  Another site that’s good for beginners is Google Patents. http://www.google.com/patents
  It’s more user friendly than the others and you can find some really fun things there.
  Some people even patent things like chip sandwiches and marshmallows! 🙂
- Martin Wallace answered on 20 Mar 2012:
  
  The company that I work for does own some patents on some of the technology that we use. Hopefully we will be able to patent some of the designs on our new bed as we have come up with some quite innovative solutions to some of the problems so far.
  Patents mean we can protect our design from someone else copying us and stealing our ideas. It can take a lot of time and effort to develop a new design so it would be very disappointing if someone else stole it without doing the same work you had done.
- Paige Brown answered on 20 Mar 2012:
  
  Hi Davies! We have a patent underway for my work putting DNA drugs on silver nanoparticles for delivering medicines and releasing them inside the human body!
- Amit Pujari answered on 21 Mar 2012:
  
  I have not patented any of my work yet! But in future I hope to do so. To be able to patent your work is a sign of ‘ your work being novel (first of its kind) and useful’.
  
  My PhD work was on a patented device, the device patented by my supervisor.