Patent ?

You are forgetting (or at least discounting) the fact that newly-minted patents are challenged all the time by interested parties who present evidence of prior art to the Patent Office during the nine month "Post-Grant Review" window.

And of course, the Inter Partes (and Ex Parte Re-exam) you mentioned.

Another problem with public disclosure prior to filing (even a Provisional) is that one runs the risk of their own invention becoming prior art, thus eliminating any possibility of patenting it, by anyone.

And if that's what the OP wants to do, there are many ways to go about it. Including, obtaining the patent himself, and then REFUSING to enforce the rights attendant thereto. :)

The good old standby, used since the 1800s (at least) is the bound NOTEBOOK; starts out blank pages, add dated and witnessed entries as one develops something. Just remember, some counties work on first to file and others on first to develop/make. In a patent description, the trick is to NOT disclose everything. Just enough to guide one SKILLED IN THE ART. You can even invent and use your own terminology. Leave out as much useful detail as possible while describing your framistan discombobbuleator - but still describe the beast. It is protected during patent litigation...."patent pending". Use an unusual or plain flaky title for the patent..."Method and use of a sub-linear audiophool money distiller" or some such.

In the final patent struggle/analysis, he with the most money wins (the patent..both lawyers gain all of the money).

Therein lies the rub. The little guy almost always gets squashed by having the big guy run up huge legal fees and tying up management time trying to enforce their patent until the little guy folds. Seen it happen more than once. Likewise filing a dodgy US patent and using it to deprive a competitor of sales to the US government.

How do they differ from patent trolls - who are much in evidence in the US preying on real manufacturers with their bought in dodgy patents and aggressive legal letters?

Unless you can sell it for about 4x what it costs to build then it probably isn't worth the bother unless it is done as a hobby.

Even if you patented it then unless you were very careful in the phrasing someone could come along and do a signal processing version on a DSP that didn't infringe your analogue design at all. I suspect such devices already exist and are sold by the usual snake oil companies at ludicrous prices. Hifi niche stuff needs the right price to sell!

Good patent lawyers are hard to find and will take your money to deliver a document which whilst it might look OK to you will not hold water.

A good rule of thumb is that if having the patent will prevent your competitors from being able to compete with your new product or put them at a big long term disadvantage then it is worthwhile going for it.

One of the cleverest mass spectrometry patents allowed the focal plane of instruments to be perpendicular to the ion beam axis. It made the detector engineering so much easier and made competitors life hell.

If it is something that anyone skilled in the art might have designed then it may not be patentable at all - have you checked prior art?

Usually it is better to keep minor devices and tricks as trade secrets and risk someone reverse engineering it if it takes off. Even then with a couple of clone competitors you stand to get about 30-40% market share with first mover advantage (at least until a major player comes along).

I find myself mystified by the recent resurgence of retro vinyl sales in supermarkets. I can only think that people have forgotten how tetchy the old mechanical record players were with low signal levels and hum loops. I wonder how long it will be before they revert to Edison wax cylinders?

I don't understand it either.

At work, one of our technicians (late 20's) mail-orders weirdly named bands on vinyl all the time. Usually, the records themselves are multi-colored (think: lime green) or odd shapes, or whatever. The album covers are nice given all the recent advancement in photography (etc..), and I guess I do s ort of miss having something like that to enhance the enjoyment, but the co nvenience of having an entire collection in MP3 format that you can carry w herever is too inviting for me to resist.

If I could convert all my old college texts and class/lab notes to Kindle f ormat, I'd to that too. (At least the good ones.)

I have several US patents, or rather I'm the sole named inventor. This stemmed from a brief period when the company I worked for was bought by GE, who have a sort of on-line patent mill.

The first one was a genuinely neat solution to a problem, but when I discovered how easy it was to apply, I entered some - shall we say - less clever ideas, most of which eventually were granted and I received a cash reward. (These are US patents which they seem to hand out like confetti.)

After escaping from the corporate hell, I worked for a few years developing a bespoke OFDM communications system. OFDM is well known, but implementation details are thin on the ground, so it was mostly invented as the job progressed. A few of the techniques were quite possibly novel and patentable, and searches showed that they hadn't been patented.

However, lots of big boys do OFDM communications systems. It was felt that they had likely already discovered some if not all of the same tricks, but didn't patent, both because they didn't want to reveal trade secrets, and because they couldn't be sure that a competitor wouldn't be able to show prior art.

So, don't reveal prior art if there's a chance that someone will trump you.

Cheers

We're talking about an individual here, who wants to protect his invention by being patented by somebody else. A provisional with reasonably well-chosen keywords is very likely to be found by an examiner during prosecution of the other guy's patent.

Which I take it is the point of the exercise. Otherwise why the question about posting a SPICE file on Usenet to establish priority?

Costs $10k minimum, though, plus maintenance fees. For $300 he can protect himself from trolls if not copycats.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That's what options 1-4 are intended to fix. If the patent is genuinely valuable, it's perfectly possible for an individual inventor to monetize it.

A patent is a property right, like the deed to your house. It is a very strong right, granted in exchange for publishing a description of the invention adequate to allow one of ordinary skill in the art to practice the invention without undue experimentation.

Enforcing a valid patent isn't trolling, it's evicting squatters. NPEs are very effective at that. The main drawback to NPEs is that their lawsuits don't result in cross-licensing deals, because they don't need anyone else's patents. Cross-licensing is (iiuc) the most common outcome of a suit involving two manufacturers, because in many industries none of them would be able to do business without practicing the other ones' patents.

That's certainly the case in computers. IBM makes a lot of money from its patent portfolio, mostly because they have a taller stack of patents to bring to the cross-licensing negotiations.

_Trolling_ is sending out baseless threats or bringing meritless suits against obviously weaker parties, expecting the terrified victim to make a quick settlement. Some trolls are NPEs, many aren't.

The Monster Cable vs Blue Jeans Cable case is the classic trolling example. (Monster got their asses handed to them--it's a great read.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

so others can advance the field further."

he idea is to encourage innovators by guaranteeing they can make some money from their creativity. But who knows ?

It is the stated purpose of patents to have the information in the patent r evealed so others can utilize that info to further advance the field. Inve ntors have other options available to protect their invention such as trade secrets. The patent protection is the carrot to get them to not keep it a secret. Quid pro quo.

Rick C.

rote:

ent application absolutely *does* establish prior art. The invention is do cumented in an application, so at that point no one can claim they invented it since this provisional application documents it in a public manner.

EE group. He was full of little nuggets like this.

ing.

n on year) simply establishes the date of any advancement in the art (i.e., the invention).

I think you are confused as to what prior art is. Inventing something does not establish prior art. It becomes prior art when it is publicly reveale d in some manner. This can be several ways and making a provisional patent application is a relatively inexpensive and foolproof way of doing it, pro vided you know how to describe your invention.

oesn't even look at them unless and until a later-filed non-provisional att empts to claim the earlier filing date of the provisional.

dered abandoned afterwards.

Meanwhile prior art has been established.

under 35 USC 102. (Google: Dynamic Drinkware, LLC v. National Graphics, Inc., 800 F.3d 1375 (Fed. Cir. 2015) for more on this. Note the key phrase in the sentence above is "By itself.." There are exceptions.

The article I read indicated the defect was in the petition, not in the act ual prior art itself.

"The original petition did not specify the subsection of Section 102 under which Fan was prior art"

Rick C.

For $35 each, I wouldn't bother building and selling a rumble filter, let alone patenting it.

Most high dollar preamps most likely already have one anyway. And just high pass filtering doesn't mean that at some gain and level it isn't going to feed back at a mid-bass frequency.

This is another good reason to go digital or just digitize the vinyl and add surface noise and distortion afterwards if wanted.

...

I'm not so sure. ???

My understanding is the USPTO doesn't even read the provisional (until clai med later in a non-provisional for earlier filing date). When I was last a t USPTO, I don't recall having any access to abandoned applications. They certainly weren't scanned and indexed. Not that I recall anyway... Maybe an examiner will chime in here with the answer - but I doubt abandoned pro visionals are routinely reviewed for prior art because at that point, it is not even established that the patent "teaches" the invention. And if it's not enabled in the application, (some say "reduced to practice"), then it' s not prior art.

Agreed, he can just throw it out there to prevent others from patenting (ma ybe) - there's also a good chance the "whatever" was already patented, in w hich case none of this discussion matters. He's infringing if the patent i s still valid. :)

But I'm not sure I understand your comment about "protecting himself from t rolls and copycats". Heck, even a bullet-proof, in-force utility patent ca n't do that!

On Tuesday, August 28, 2018 at 6:07:13 PM UTC-4, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wr ote:

es >not establish prior art. It becomes prior art when it is publicly reve aled in >some manner. This can be several ways and making a provisional pa tent >application is a relatively inexpensive and foolproof way of doing it , >provided you know how to describe your invention.

I think you are confused, but I agree with sentences 2 & 3 above. But I'm assuming you are equating the filing of a provisional patent applic ation to be (or, eventually be) a means to put something in the public doma in (i.e., prior art).

See the MPEP 1120 that describes how provisional patent applications are pu blished. (Hint: They aren't!)

So, I really fail to see how the act of not publishing a provisional patent application (no matter how well its described) publicly reveals it to anyo ne. But sure, if the Inventor wants to disseminate his application on Instagram , or publish it on a billboard, that's going to be prior art. No argument there.

e considered abandoned afterwards.

Again, I refer you to the MPEP as to what EXACTLY constitutes (and does not constitute) prior art. While the answer to that question is undoubtedly , voluminous, technical and highly nuanced, it is clear to me that an unpubl ished provisional (that may not even actually disclose or teach the inventi on it purports to) can possibly be prior art.

Bottom line: Filing a provisional doesn't do ANYTHING to the PRIOR art. By definition, the PRIOR art is whatever existed BEFORE the application was filed. If the application created Prior Art, logically every application would Section-102 themselves to smithereens. Think about it. :)

Maybe we are talking past each other?

Anyway, the takeaway in the case I mentioned previously is that if you, as the Inventor, say something is prior art, then the Patent Office automatica lly agrees with you!! That was really the crux of the case. And I agree t he appeal was defective (but that observation is not relevant to our discus sion).

Not this. No preamp or phono stage has it as far as OI know but I will ask those in the know about that market.

isn't going to feed back at a mid-bass frequency."

It is not just high pass filtering. It is a controlled blend of the channel s. Because of the way a stereo phonograph works, most of the acoustic feedb ack as well as rumble is in the L-R. This is eliminated and the turnover fr equency is user adjustable so they can set it to the required amount of ble nd.

add surface noise and distortion afterwards if wanted. "

Not happening with this market. They listen to vinyl partly because it has never been digitized.

I appreciate your input but it is getting into legal gobbletygook that I wo uld hire a lawyer for. I know there are reasons for this - they want to enc ourage innovation, not discourage it.

With all the banter, I am not sure what to do, post a spice file ? Maybe ex aminers won't know about Usenet but they would have to be made aware to hav e it considered prior art, and now I am not so sure that would work.

I am pretty sure I could write an effective patent, well I think so. But al l this other legal shit complicates the matter.

Luckily none of this is urgent. With the other things I am doing (I wish th ey were profitable !) we are months away from a prototype.

I would do a little bit of other things too, like sweetening the frequency response. With +/- 1 dB to play with that is 2 dB. In other words I can mak e this thing sound gooood. I know just where to market it and it is cheap a nd full of fanatics who will throw $ 200 out the window just to try a new t hing out.

That is the only reason I am even considering it. It looks like I have a sl ight edge, and I rarely take big risks without an edge. Let's play poker. W ear a red shirt, I am low on red shirts. I have never see an edge in life l ike this. you real engineers get phone calls and specs in the mail and all that, you get work. I don't. If I accomplish this and really make a mark I will be happy to die with that under my belt, or shoes or whatever.

One thing that really bother me is how easy it is to do. OK, it was too muc h to incorporate into preamps and whatever but when it is mass production s aving one dollar can make a huge bonus.

And though the parts cost and all that is not high, this is not all that ea sy to implement.

Yes, if you're talking about the golden ears market. But they'll pay way more than $35... If you want that market, I'd raise the price to several hundred dollarse and make some money on it, especially with the cost of support.

Are they *really* recording to analogue multi-track tape using all analogue effects, through an analogue mixing desk (etc, etc)?

I suspect there's digitisation (almost certainly total) further back in the recording chain long before it gets to the vinyl...

All this fuss so you can hear clicks, pops, hiss not to mention every time you drop the needle in the groove you're wearing the thing out & degrading the next listen!

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote

Ha! I understand what you do! As the pickup arm moves from left to right with the turns of the platform, the needle's angle towards the record changes a bit (not a digital bit eeehh) so the left right channels assignment changes. If you can detect the (and that depends on rpm) speed you can undo that I'd think. you compensate left versus right gain? So use uncorrected sound to filter or PLL to get the correction versus position

Subtract left from right for some VLF frequency band? Sorry, prior art Usenet posting....

I was really into that audio stuff in the days of the Beatles etc... Build some nice preamps too.

I agree with the other poster, go digital, there is a lot of digital signal processing to clean up old record available, some code even for free. Put your code in a code protected processor. Sell the thing. All 24 bits 192 k samples of course at the minimum.. ;-)

Hey, do not take my advice, just woke up, but I used that code protected method in the past. But if you talk too much about it, then maybe you are giving away your secrets. Maybe patent anyway, if it is not too late, no more record player here, else I could try :-) You need a big speaker set with very low frequency capabilities to hear that sort of sounds anyways, who has it?

Often there is too much noise around anyways.. Headphones...

I liked the Quad electrostat speakers, especially for the high frequencies. Were also used as monitors in the studio control room.

Almost all mp3 here.... Some mp2, some .wav.

Thanks, this was indeed a good read. I wonder what the Monster Cable lawyer thought when he started reading the response :-)