• The law has a Notice Requirement: Once you have a patent or patent pending status, tell everyone about it. The traditional way to do this was to write your patent number on your product. However, now this can be done virtually (See Fact 2). Notice is crucial, because if you don’t provide notice of your patent (or pending) rights, then you aren’t entitled to monetary compensation from competitors who have been infringing your patent rights under your radar.
• Virtual Patent Marking makes it easy to meet the notice requirement: Recent updates to our patent laws allow for a “Virtual Patent Marking”. This simply means that you can now put the public ‘on notice’ of your patent rights over the internet. If done correctly, you satisfy your notice requirement, and you no longer have the burden of constantly monitoring and notifying your competitors one-by-one.
• The more you wait, the more you lose: It could take months, if not years, to discover and locate people who infringed on your patent. By the time you find these infringers and put them on notice of your patent rights, they may have made substantial profits from your idea. Moreover, you won’t be entitled to any of those profits unless you can prove that the infringers had notice of your patent rights. The Virtual Patent Mark is a legally recognized form of ‘public notice’ that will entitle you to a portion of the infringers’ revenue, even if you didn’t provide them with notice directly.
• The Patent Seal™ is your ally: It’s effective, inexpensive, and easy to use. The Patent Seal™ is a Virtual Patent Marking certificate issued by licensed patent attorneys that you can use to meet the Legal Notice Requirements under 35 U.S.C. § 287. Just place the Patent Seal™ Virtual Patent Mark on your website. When your website visitors click on your Patent Seal™, they will be directed to a certificate detailing your intellectual property rights.

Under 35 U.S.C. § 287, patent owners may collect montery reward from patent infiringers only if the patent owners have provided adequate notice of their patent(s). Failure to comply with the patent marking and notice requirements of US Patent law can be a costly oversight for patent owners. To meet this requirement, recent updates to US Patent law permit a patent owner to put the public on constructive notice via "virtual marking."