It may sound good, but wrong. Prior art is "information" on an invention, not a product. If you bury an invention inside a product that does not constitute prior art unless you provide info describing your invention.
For a product to constitute prior art, it would have to be on sale in the US for more than 12 months before an application for a patent on that invention. In other words, if you sell an invention without patenting it, someone else has 12 months to patent it and could then come looking for you regarding *your* patent infringement.
You can use patents to your advantage or you can let others use them to your disadvantage. Be smart or be ignorant.
Another option is to publish your idea to make it prior art so someone with the bucks and lawyers cannot come along later, patent and claim you are infringing.
By the time you actually get your patent it may be useless. Technology evolves quickly, much quicker than the USPTO processing machine.
You may get a patent but it is not really valid until it has been sucessfully defended in the courts.
Valid, good point - BUT - there are some here who have successfully pants s ome others for patent infringement. But then there are those who successful ly fought against a patent infringement suit.
You shouldn't make a blanket statement like that. Like in trademarks, our v ersion of ma bell here, "Ohio Bell" had to make rich a guy who already had the company name. He made bells. He was in Ohio and made bells and was ther e before the phone company.
I mean like, he made bells out in his barn or some shit, it was not like Fo rd Motor Company.
My one attorney told me there are like patent insurance companies. They act ually pay people to shop, and look for things that do what the things their clients make do, buy them and see if they stole the idea. Actually I think that would be one hell of a cool job, but then you can't let every rube do it, they have to have some brains.
And as a patent holder you should consult a patent attorney before even fil ing, but make sure you file the next morning first thing for a provisional. It is like a hundred bucks. It establishes prior art.
And then there is another problem, with all the shit made overseas, what do you do if some company in China gets ahold of the design and knocks them o ff ? Suing people is alot easier if you are in the same country. What if th ey were made in North Korea and brought in through Sweden, like Cuban cigar s used to ? (or maybe still are)
And then writing the patent is the whole thing. Too specific but not too sp ecific. Too vague but not too vague. A precise balance.
Yes, I have ran into a few people dealt with this shit. It is both a bitch, and fascinating. And even how you present the case in court, if/when it co mes to that.
And now, the bottom line...
You know, we now live in a society that requires mandatory education, yet p uts a high price on knowledge.
Well OK, that wasn't that good.
But the bottom line is the whole patent process is a big PITA. When I had i deas I considered encapsulating them. Potting compound like used in HV comp onents in CRT TVs etc. Patenting it gives out the design, potting makes rev erse engineering a real bitch in heat.
Was there a patent on the pet rock ? Or did the first guy sell like a hundr ed of them and then others took it all over ? Thngs like this, even snopes knows not.
Well they can still claim you are infringing, as the USPTO examiners rarely read all of the relevant prior art. Also, someone can quite easily come along and claim that you infringe their patent on something else entirely, even if you don't, and it can be expensive to prove otherwise.
Still I am in favour of publishing your inventions if you are not going to patent them. There can be some value in publishing them anonymously or under another name, so that if there is some competitor who already thinks they have a patent on your invention, they don't know who is using it in a product, and with luck they will never get to reverse engineer your product and find you and sue you. If you publish it under your own name, they know you are probably using that invention in your product and that could make you a target.
There are journals whose only purpose is to publish inventions as prior art. Some of these are open and some of them are very expensive and hard to access. Some of them encourage patent examiners to read them (and hopefully prevent those inventions from being patented in the future).
You could publish your inventions as adverts in the back pages of some small town newspaper which would theoretically make other people's future patents on your invention invalid, but the onus and expense would be on you to prove that, as patents are presumed valid once granted, until proven otherwise.
No, that doesn't stop them from suing you, at all. It only gives your (soon to be) rich lawyers something to use against their (soon to be rich) lawyers in court.
Wrong. Prior art is just that. The problem is to prove it in court.
Utter nonsense. Prior art is prior art the instant it's invented. The
12-month bar is *only* to prevent the (original) inventor from patenting the idea *after* he has used it (for the year). It has nothing to do with someone else patenting an already existing idea.
It doesn't even have to be disclosed. Only evidence of the prior idea/use is needed. That's the purpose of the engineering notebook. In practice, you have to prove the prior art to the courts. This is where publication helps. Some.
In every company I've been in, the IP law department was independent of the general law department. They knew *exactly* what IP cost them. As I said in an earlier post, IBM made over $1B per year from patent licensing, alone. That's net profit.
I think that it is only considered prior art if it has been disclosed, publically.
If you want all of the gory details, here:
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The engineering notebook used to be very important before the US changed to "first to file", because under the old system, you could file for a patent on something after someone else already had, and as long as the date in your notebook was before the date in theirs (and you could prove it was genuine) then you could beat them with your late application. I guess that led to a lot of arguments ("interference proceedings") which is why everyone uses "first to file" now. As I understand it you still have to have invented the invention, however, so you (theoretically) can't learn about someone else's invention and then file a patent on it before they do, and beat them that way. In practice maybe you can, unless they keep good notebooks and have them witnessed often:
Not true. Publication proves date of invention. An entry in an engineering notebook can do the same but will have less weight in court and the court is all that matters.
something fundamental is sought, but then delayed and delayed, allowing an industry to grow, only to find out one fine day that someone else now owns the whole thing.
These kinds of dilatory tactics are why the term of patents is now counted as twenty years from the date of original application, and not seventeen years from the date of grant.
He is right. Having invented it only establishes priority if you file for a patent. Once a patent is granted to someone else you lose. I think it is worse than that. There is a deadline of 1 year in there somewhere. Keep it totally secret and you are not establishing prior art. Even trade secrets that are sold in products are not considered prior art.
No, he's not. Priority has nothing to do with it. the one-year bar is only for *you* to file. If you don't, no one can (under the law but reality is different). The existence of art *is* prior art.
I worked on a patent review board at IBM for fifteen years. We advised IP law on the value and uniqueness (including performing prior art searches) of patents that had been submitted (our board's area of expertise was "circuits and specials"). As usual, you haven't a frappin' clue.
Yes, the one-year, from time of "commercial gain"[*], bar is on the inventor to file his patent. After that, it cannot be patented. BTW, that's a US only thing. In the rest of the world, you're barred from filing at the time of disclosure.
[*] If you demonstrate, or even promise performance that can be had from your invention, to a customer and don't even disclose the invention, the clock starts.
I didn't know that one. I can imagine that it's not enforced. Who's going to do the enforcement? It can also be expensive (mold changes, etc.).
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