US consumer products design reference - what inventors should know

Your best bet is to have an patent attorney look after your interests. You should be in contact with the various standards organizations. It is costly, but this is part of the investment. Getting free information from various non directly approved sources would not be considered legally admissible in court when applying for a patent, or when fighting a defence case because of an overlooked problem.

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JANA _____

If I were the inventor of the Vego-Pedi-Pod(tm), and wanted to mass market them, how would I find the applicable laws and codes? Any books that walk you thru the process?

I am aware of a few safety and regulation agencies such as CE, UL, CSPC, FCC. While CE codes seem to be the law overseas, UL and CSPC codes appear to be only suggestions, and afaik, not requirements. In the case of the UL, they are expensive requirements since the cost to even read them approaches $1k per document (what a scam).

So far the only real requirements I have seen for this category of product is FCC part 15. Surely there are more?

You might want to go to groups.google.com and read back through the sci.engr.electrical.compliance newsgroup. It's not very busy right now, but there's been a lot discussion in the past couple of years.

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)