patent question

Since the patent office is now a government revenue source, it is in the interest of examiners to make a minimal effort and allow a patent on most anything. The many patent attorneys around the country are delighted that they do.

Or trade them with others in the same position to allow them to enter markets.

Only if you're in a high volume market and you're blindly selling widgets. Niches aren't very interesting for knock-offs. Marketing and support also account for something.

It's better to have no competition. In a niche market, few people want to enter second, and start a price war for half of a small market. Small companies naturally tend to stay out of one anothers way.

Customer loyalty is important, too. If someone cloned my products, my customers wouldn't buy from them, even if they were cheaper. They would buy from someone else if our quality or support were bad.

You clearly don't understand the whole concept of a patent. It's purpose is exactly the opposite. It requires the owner of the patent to *teach* all of the relevant technology (known at the time of the application) in return for a period during which the owner has exclusive commercial use of the idea. It certainly doesn't limit others thoughts. Exactly the opposite, in fact, since it's purpose is to *teach*. BTW, the period of a (US) patent is 20 years (not 50), starting with the date of the application.

Huh?

The patent is *exactly* the opposite of what you've said.

That's precisely what a patent does! It teaches technology. In trade for teaching your invention, you're granted a limited-time monopoly to practice that invention.

No one said the patent process was perfect. ...or the USG, for that matter. That doesn't mean that either should be abolished.

patents on ideas are useless and in the worst case are a bad thing.

I repeat the practical implementation may be owned by a person or a company, this is a "patrimoine" like we say in France, i have nothing to object on this because it represents financial effort and it's normal to be protected.

Please don't mix ideas and implentation in your "discours"

Cheers, Habib.

Yes, it also helps when those who are making the decisions are using OPM. My PPoE's products were quite like yours - high margin, niche market, market with deep pockets. The big difference was that in one of our markets, we sold through another company that had deep market penetration and all of the sales/support in place that we couldn't afford (at that scale).