Why does a patent not give us the right to use our invention?

The purpose of a patent is to incentivize an inventor to publicly disclose his/her invention by providing him/her a limited monopoly over making, using, selling, importing, or distributing a patented invention. However, the government won't pursue infringers for you. The patent only gives YOU, the patent owner, the right to pursue infringers for infringing on your rights -- rights that the government have granted you. This involves time and money but can usually lead to settlement. Of course, factors to consider are: value of the patent, size of the market, size of your company, size of the infringer's company, etc. A large company will sometimes not care if they've trodden on the rights of a small inventor since they know that the inventor 1) probably can't afford a case against them and 2) even if the inventor CAN afford it, he/she won't have the same resources that the big company has (money, suite of lawyers, researchers, access to expert testimony, etc.).

To answer your question, a patent DOES give you the right to use your invention. It also gives you the right to pursue others for using your patented technology.

Please let me know if this answers your questions.

With all due respect to Ahmed Alhafidh, a patent does NOT give you ANY rights to use your invention - according to the patent laws, a patent is effectively defensive, not offensive. The rights granted under or by means of a patent is the right to prevent OTHERS from making, using, or selling your patented invention. If you were to practice your own invention, you may be infringing another's patent. So, 1) the purpose of a patent application is to obtain a patent; and 2) once you have the patent, you can then enforce it against others and prevent them from making, using, or selling your patented invention.

There is also an additional scenario which may be of interest to you. Let's say that you are the first one to patent a chair - your main claim broadly recites the chair as comprising at least one leg (a central pedestal), a seat attached to the leg/pedestal, and a back attached to the seat. Now, no one else can manufacture or sell this chair. Someone else comes along and decides that the chair, probably made from wood, metal, or plastic, is uncomfortable, and so they add a seat cushion to your chair and obtain a patent. Having obtained their patent, they cannot make or sell their own chair because they would be infringing your patent - while their chair has a cushion, it also has at least one leg, a seat, and a back - hence they would infringe your patent if they made or sold their chair. But their chair, if it could be made, would probably sell better than your chair because it would be more comfortable. You cannot make or sell a cushioned chair, even though you want to because you can see the comfort advantages, because you would infringe their patent. So, what to do?
You cross-license each other - you can make the cushioned chair, and they can make their own chair because as a result of the license, you have both agreed not to sue each other for infringement. Obviously, this is a very simplistic example but hopefully you can appreciate how patents work.

I also would add that while counselor Kolitch is correct, another easy way to think about your rights under a patent is to remember that the Patent Act grants you the right to EXCLUDE others from making, using, and selling YOUR patented invention. This is what makes your patent useful. YOUR rights to make a product that relates to the claims in your patent, may nonetheless infringe another person's patent. In my example, consider further that if your new widget contains A +B +C elements, where C is new and not found in the prior art, your application may likely be issued a patent if it is new, useful, and non-obvious, after examination. However, in my example, if someone else holds a patent to the combination of A+B, your invention is patentable since it has new element C but you will need a license to the patent covering A+B to keep from infringing this patent. Presumably, your patent is valuable because it gives you the exclusive right to exclude others from making a product that infringes one or more of YOUR claims in your patent that include elements A+B+C. You may have to pay a license fee to the A+B patent owner but presumably the feature C which you have patented is a valuable variation to the industry that customers will want. If so, this could make your A+B+C patent valuable even though you pay license fees. Hope this helps.

A patent gives the patentee (the owner of the patent) the right to exclude another from making, using or selling the claimed invention. If you were to build your invention and some subsystem or subcomponent in your invention was protected by someone else's patent, then the device you built may be infringing someone else's patent(s). So filing a patent application is one thing; building a device is another. Before building your device, you should conduct an infringement search to make sure there are no other patents that may cover subsystems/components of your device.

Since there's been a difference of opinion, I thought I would provide a third answer. Steven Weinrieb is absolutely correct that a patent does NOT provide any right to make, use or sell the patented invention. The reason is quite simple to understand through example. Suppose your invention has four parts A, B, C, D, and your patent covers the combination A+B+C+D, which you were able to patent because A+B+C+D is an incredibly useful and surprising combination. Theoretically, all of parts A, B, C, and D could be separately patented by others, in which case you would be infringing all of those prior patents if you make or sell your invention. In other words, it's absolutely possible and commonplace to obtain a patent on something that includes portions which were previously patented by others. This is what a freedom to operate analysis is all about.

Shawn Kolitch, Ph.D.
Shareholder, Kolisch Hartwell, P.C.
Portland, Oregon, USA
shawn@khpatent.com