Here's my favorite part:

If you decide a patent is worth the effort, your next step should be to see if there is "prior art" on your idea -- the technical term for a previously issued patent, or any public discussion, use or sale of the idea, such as in printed materials or at trade shows.

There's no requirement that you do such a search, but it can save you lots of time and trouble. Among the 360,000 applications that are filed each year, about 83% get rejected on the first round, most of them because the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office found prior art. If you do a prior-art search before you submit, you can see whether your idea has already been patented -- and if so, you can tweak it to set it apart from existing products.

Experts recommend getting a third party to do the prior-art search for you. Patent lawyers or agents will know how to navigate the vast trove of records in a patent library or online at www.uspto.gov, and they'll know the types of things that set off red flags for patent examiners. For instance, the Patent Office mandates that ideas must be new, useful and nonobvious -- nuanced guidelines that can be difficult for a newcomer to puzzle out.

If you believe that, and think you have something to patent, give Patent Hawk a call. Here's another reason why:

Joanne Hayes-Rines, publisher of Inventors' Digest, a trade publication, says prior-art searches usually cost between $750 and $1,000.

Patent Hawk suggests a budget limit of $500 for a patentability search, and can often do it for less. How? Lots of practice.

Addendum - The Wall Street Journal article was corrected, though not the part about recommending a prior art search. Here's the most provocative correction.

A patent grants the holder the right to make sure others don't make, use, import, sell or offer to sell the subject matter of the patent without the patent holder's permission. An article about patents in Monday's Journal Report incorrectly said patents give the exclusive right to sell or license an idea, though that may be the practical effect so long as the patent holder enforces the patent.

Well, that just shoots the presumption that the author, Raymund Flandez, more than glibly understood what he was writing about. Raymund, even in his correction, fails to convey the patent grant: a right to enforce denial of use of the claimed invention.

Though sharing the same mindset, the Wall Street Journal is not nearly as bad as BeavisWeek. For my money, the best general news magazine on the planet: The Economist.