KnowThis Tutorial: Marketing Method Patents

3. Constructing the Drawings
Possibly the most time consuming area of the patent application deals with the patent drawings. It is not the actual process of creating drawings that is difficult; it is the conceptual aspect that tends to bog the process down. By conceptual we mean trying to determine what should be included within the drawings that helps those reading the application understand what the invention is all about. For business method patents this almost always means drawings are in the form of steps or processes. The task of breaking down a business method into steps or processes is often the mental equivalent of hard labor. But this exercise is crucial for identifying the elements of the invention that are unique and, thus potentially patentable.

As mentioned, breaking a process down can be difficult. While at first glance a process may seem simple, it is important for the inventor to consider all related or potentially related factors that make the process work. Consider the drawing shown below from patent #6,584,450 for a method of renting items online awarded to Netflix.com. This drawing shows the steps, each uniquely numbered, involved in having a customer access a website and then rent items, which in Netflix’s case is movies. Each action, event, procedure, etc., whether technical (e.g., computers involved) or manual (e.g., people involved) should be identified and assigned a unique number. And since a process must be fully explained, an inventor is almost always going to provide multiple drawings. In fact, some business method patent applications contain 20 or more pages of drawings.

While the above drawing is a basic flow chart, not all parts of the drawings must be flow charts. For instance, for patents on Internet processes it is common to present screen shots of a web browser to show some aspect of the invention, such as what an Internet user might experience when they are exposed to the business method. Also, flow diagrams themselves may contain images of some kind, such as a clip art image of a person interacting with a computer. So for business method patent applications drawing flow diagrams is an essential skill. While this part of the patent application can be contracted to a third-party, there are several excellent software products that make creating flow charts a relatively easy process with Microsoft’s Visio being one of the best.