^
All you can do is manufacturer parts in separate countries with shell companies and assemble on site. Anything else, and it will be stolen.
No one around you has any idea about how things work, or they are lying to you. Figure that out first.
What makes you think China will care?
Are they already stealing it?
No -> it’s not worth it to them to steal they dgaf.
yes > it’s worth it to them they dgaf
my biggest struggle has been finding alibaba manufacturers that will even make a thing for me…
Get yourself a good sourcing agent, you can find one on upwork or sourcebirds
How much do they normally charge?
What’s a sourcing agent??
People who can find a manufacturer that you are looking for.
To everyone starting out: always, always hire one. They’ll make sure you are woking with an actual factory and not a reseller, will review the certifications etc.There are countless stories about how people lose all of theirs savings because they chose the wrong supplier.
Thanks for the tip!
Interesting gonna look that up
Thanks for this!
Use yumari rather than alibaba. They help with product development, supplier matchmaking etc
Honestly, international patents are not recognized in China!
You need a Chinese patent! Which fortunately are relatively cheap and fairly easy to do!
Another thing you could do is get a NNN done and notarized, I do that all the time!
And most of the vendors on alibaba are trading companies so you need to ensure your NNN is valid for this use!
Hope that helps!
None of this matters unless you have the legal firepower to defend your patents.
Sorry, what is NNN?
No Nut November
NNN (non-disclosure, non-use, and non-circumvention)
Note NNN needs to be in Chinese (if you include any other languages you need that officially translated and notarized).
It needs to be notarized in the city/province of the vendor properly stamped and signed by the other party.
You don’t have to be personally there but you need to be represented ~ it can be personal to you or your company!
Hope this is helpful!
So glad you asked bc i was confused how a triple net lease applied here 🤣🤣🤣
Patent only applies to your country. I would not recommend exposing your patent to Chinese manufacturers.
I mean… patents are published with instructions for building it … they’re on the internet… china uses the same internet… 🤷🏽♂️
Patents are effectively useless for protecting your idea.
Patents only benefit the corporations. If you need a patent to be successful you kind of suck. There are ways to protect your IP such as ASICS that’s are hard coded from the factory that can’t have the firmware extracted and so if someone gets the product and tears it down they will have to re-write the code from scratch rendering it a knock off that may not be the same
if they find your patent, it will be their direct blueprint to copying it. My last company preferred trade secrets over patents for this reason.
How does trade secrets work?
You don’t tell anyone. This is more relevant for things that aren’t easily reverse engineered, such as recipes, high tech methods, software, etc.
In order to be granted a patent, the government requires that you explicitly detail how to create or perform whatever your patent is over in extreme detail so that anyone in the relevant industry can recreate it after the patent expires.
Patents expire after 20 years, but you have a guaranteed monopoly protected by the government.
Trade secrets grant no legal protection (sorta, it’s complicated). It’s literally just keeping things secret to prevent knockoffs. The trade off is that if someone reverse engineers your thing, you have no legally protected monopoly. So your advantage can last a few months (if reverse engineered) or well beyond the 20 years that would’ve been offered by a patent.
Some things are tightly regulated though, so it’s impossible to operate with secrets - think drug manufacturing.
Other side enters into an agreement with you that it will maintain secrecy over your technology. In other words, your invention is protected via contract.
It’s a secret.
lol yep, you don’t publicize your secret sauce, you can do NDAs for your employees and partners. We were a small company and had a vested interest in the products success so no one squealed, but NDAs and severance agreements can assist even if they don’t prevent it 100% but still, a better chance than public information
I’ve read about manufacturing different parts of your product at different manufacturers and assembling at your plant, so no one knows the final product or who are they working for, and it’s more difficult to copy, but that method seems kinda difficult for a startup.
They don’t work you can reverse engineer anything. You just can’t steal it you can copy anything it’s just how you copy it. Like if you work there and then copy it yourself you can’t do that but you can buy their product take it apart and copy it that is legal and valid and companies do that
Trade secrets don’t get patented. They rely on the secret for protection. Part if the patent process is detailing exactly what and how the invention works.
The question you’re probably missing is why are trade secrets better. Because when you file a patent, it must include all the detail necessary to reproduce the idea, not just disclosing the idea but also how to make it.
Usually the complexity in a thing is not the thing itself, but the way it is made, so if the method of making it remains a secret, it is much more difficult to copy.
A good implementation example is the Phillips screw. They weren’t the first to think of it and anyone looking at it would be able to copy it. The ingenuity was that they were the first to come up with a way to manufacture them cheaply. I don’t know if they patented that method, but if they did, then the method would be exposed to all. Or if they kept it a trade secret, others would have to figure it out on their own, which is harder and more expensive.
Well, you keep things secret, like the full formula for Coca Cola
It works because part of the patenting process requires full exposure of how your patent works. Which basically makes it very easy to steal if the thief has no regard for Intellectual Property law
OP would have to expose the full patent in court and the Chinese Manufacturers would just Copy and Paste that shit.
European patent applies to whole of the EU. Then you file a patent for the US, Canada and Australia and have pretty much the whole western world covered
But obtaining a patent in one jurisdiction doesn’t mean it will be granted elsewhere
I never said it does. Just wanted to clarify that if i register a patent at the EU patent agency it won’t apply only to my country whichever that is.
Why not hire a lawyer and make sure you are protected? The law works in China just like anywhere else
This is the most comical thing I’ve ever read
They don’t recognize international patents, maybe in the US. They have their own, if you register your patent under a Chinese patent then you’ll be well protected.
:D
I have a bridge I want to sell you
Its More easy to sue the other vendors that sell your idea, o would guess
Bold of you to assume china give a F
lol. chinese courts dgaf about your patents.
😂
lol. chinese courts don’t give a flying fucc about your patents.