About the Inventors Assistance League

The Inventors Assistance League (IAL) and other non-profit organizations exist because our founder and President, Ted De Boer, a registered patent agent with the U.S. Patent, Trademark & Copyright Office, was fed up with the public's lack of affordable legal information and advice in the area of inventions, ideas and innovations. After many years of research with Fortune 100 companies, Mr. De Boer developed a self-help program that is understandable, easy-to-use and authoritative for the amateur and professional inventor. The program has undergone many changes and refinements over the years, but the purpose has never changed: to take the mystery out of the patent, trademark and copyright law and to make it available to everyone in a manner that is easy to understand and easy to implement.

About five counselors work in the Los Angeles Office We regularly update our On-site Program and our Home Study Learning Program, because the laws change constantly, and we work to keep our products up to date. We encourage our members to suggest ideas for improvement, which we can incorporate into new editions of our products.

Patent, trademark and copyright lawyers sometimes compare self-help law to do-it-yourself brain surgery. Nonsense, it's much more akin to choosing an over-the-counter remedy for a routine illness. Whether they want to relieve a headache, file for a copyright, trademark or patent, obtain Pre-Patent protection or learn how to market their ideas, inventions and innovations in a controlled environment, people can do much of the work themselves if they have good, reliable information.

Over thirty years of experience has only strengthened our belief that the law, like any other body of information, can be broken down and organized into small, easily-digested bits. Once that's done, it's relatively easy to find answers to legal questions, whether they concern an invention, idea or innovation question, or a patent, trademark or copyright dispute.

IAL's mission is far from a radical idea. Every American's right to know the law—without paying a lawyer—is a cornerstone of our democracy. Making the process easier is what we are here for.

"When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and tha the truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our constitution. It is an experiment as all life is an experiment."

– Abrams v. United States, 250 S616,630[1919]

"It was from America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their business and that the nation is responsible to Heaven for the act of the State—ideas long locked in the breast of solitary thinkers, and hidden among Latin folios—burst forth like a conqueror upon the earth they were destined to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man... and the principle gained ground, that a nation can never abandon its fate to an authority it cannot control."

– Lord Acton 1834-1902