One often hears that European mentality does not regard patents as important as folks in the US. One of the signifiers: patent and copyrights laws in any European country are much less extensive than those in America. While this might seem trivial, this fact is relevant for technology start-ups. We talked with Richard Allan Horning, one of the most highly regarded Silicon Valley attorneys, about patents and why they are important. Richard has been representing technology companies since 1970. His clients vary from early-stage start-ups to Fortune 500 multi-nationals. Today Richard spends a significant part of his time helping Northern European companies expand to US.

'US has a great breadth of patent law system - you can patent almost anything', says Richard. 'This is important for young technology companies in order to protect technology and business processes. Venture capitalists also find patents important because they give a company protection from business rivals.' So if you are a young start-up raising funding, you should not diss patents as an after-thought.

'Young entrepreneurs like building technology and going to the market with it, they try to stay away from lawyers. I agree with that', Richard chuckles, 'but you cannot do that if it would compromise your position in the market later on. There are many companies that we often do not hear about who were left behind because they did not make sensible investments to protect their technology'.

Possibly the most relevant thing to know about patents for young technology start-ups expanding to US is the provisional patent application. 'If you have an idea for a new technology, you can file a description of it without any drawings.  As long as there is enough information to reproduce the idea, you get a priority date. Then you have a year to turn this into a real patent', shares Richard.

'This gives you 12 months to decide whether you want to pursue that idea and raise funding if you do. It costs much less to file than an actual patent', Richard continues. 'It also means that when you talk to people about your idea you can disclose all the information because you already have a patent on the file. As long as you follow the process, you'd get a patent and its date would go back to the earlier provisional date'.

Image by Chris of the Hunt