Selling Your Patent – How Much You Can Expect

By: Michael J Foycik Jr. 
Septemper 25, 2013
The author is a patent attorney with over 28 years experience in patents and trademarks. For further information, please email at IP1lwyr@gmail.com, or call at 877-654-3336.

Many inventors have profited from selling their patents.  So how much do they get?  The answers are surprising, or at least they surprised me.

Having talked with many inventors, and also having talked with many corporate patent departments, I've heard many examples.  Let me give you a few general examples, based on published accounts and interviews with public speakers.

Assuming the inventor has an issued patent for an article and has sold that article through at least one retail store, there will almost certainly be corporate interest.  Vendors often report new products they see when visiting retail stores, which accounts for the corporate interest.  If the corporation makes an offer, it will typically be anywhere from $50 thousand to $8 million, and can be higher.

On the other hand, an inventor trying to simply market an issued patent to corporations, is likely to get anywhere from $5,000 to $35,000.  This does not take into account the likelihood of a corporation making an offer.  Some inventors hire a marketing service to try to interest companies; such marketing companies usually keep statistics on their success rate, which varies.  I recommend that anyone considering such companies first check out their success rates.

Or, if going through a television marketing company, the numbers are different.  If that company is of the type that develops and makes the products based on your patent, they may prefer to license the patent rather than buy it.  The royalty rate in such a case might be $2 million per year guaranteed plus a bonus based on sales.   Such agreements may be for two years, and can be longer.  This all varies, of course, depending on the specific company and the nature of the product.

Read More >> http://internationalpatentservice.com/Selling-Your-Patent-How-Much-You-Can-Expect.html