Where is the place to patent a product for a non US citizen in order to have the best coverage?

You should ask a patent attorney.

This is a little hard to answer because it is so vague. It depends on the area, the market and the strength of innovation. I know that The App Guy has a terrific podcast at http://www.theappguy.co/ and is also trying to organize a community for App developers to sell their ideas. Let me know if I can be of further assistance to discuss patentability in terms of its value to getting a sale or license. What ever you do, don't spend money filing a full patent, just a provisional. Good luck.

Below is a link to a resource I provide my investors. The 50 questions are specific to product design/development but the 15 categories are questions that apply to any industry. If you can answer these questions about your deal you will have gone a long way to avoiding the common pitfalls in the product commercialization process. http://www.jaredjoyce.com/freetreats/50questions.pdf Once you have answered the questions for your deal if you'd like to call me I can evaluate your answers, educate you on what strategies are available that would be the best fit for you, and then help you execute your strategy.

First of all, what you have is a provisional patent **application**. For now, the provisional patent application is not publicly available. This can be a big advantage to you. You can use this time to improve your invention and file additional provisional applications. If you don't plan on making/practicing the invention yourself, you should make sure to try to think of everything possible regarding how that invention can be improved. This would (hopefully) come naturally to a practicing inventor. When you file your non-provisional application, your disclosure will be made public ("published") 18 months from the filing of the non-provisional. While your applications are not publicly available, I suggest waiting until you file your non-provisional application(s) to talk to others. Quite often, provisional applications do not have the detail or the scope that the non-provisional will have -- due to the time spent on getting drawings accurate and making sure everything is included in your non-provisional applications. It is best to have a complete application before talking to practicing companies. Sophisticated companies will take advantage of information not disclosed in your provisional application to file their own patent applications. If your applications are not publicly available (or even they are published), you should sign confidentiality agreements (non-disclosure agreements) with anyone you talk to about licensing or buying your invention. Keeping track of who you talked to with confidentiality agreements can be the basis for "notice" of the invention by an infringer -- when they eventually steal your invention. You can sell your idea anytime, but a provisional application is worth a lot less than a non-provisional application which is worth less than an allowed application or issued patent. Provisional applications are generally not as complete as they could be -- and require additional time and finesse to complete the non-provisional application. In terms of appearances, if you are not willing to put in the money to file the non-provisional application, the invention is likely not worth that much money. Companies as well as non-practicing entities may look at provisional applications, but not for long, and will not give you the kind of money that you may get from selling a fully examined patent. Of course, it depends on how good your invention is.

Since you do not have a duty to disclose prior art to the USPTO, you could approach your competitor and try to negotiate a license for their patent pending technology. However, there are two caveats to this approach. First, your competitor does have a duty to disclose prior art to the USPTO. If they learn about the prior art in the course of negotiations with them for a license, they would need to disclose that prior art to the USPTO if the patent has not yet issued. The patent could be declared invalid if they later sued an infringer and it came out during litigation that they did not disclose known prior art. Second, it is much easier to notify the USPTO of this prior art while the patent is pending than after the patent issues. You would only have to pay $180 and would have six months after the application was published to file the prior art with the USPTO (under the new rules of 37 CFR 1.290). The USPTO will only consider written documents, so there would need to be some kind of published document relating to the prior art you found, such as a company brochure showing or describing the feature. I would be happy to assist you with this matter whether you decide to negotiate with your competitor or submit the prior art to the USPTO.