What Happens When You Get Caught Using Somebody's Patent?

If you are doing serious contract business, providing a system or software you may have signed a "quiet enjoyment" clause meaning that your customers will expect you to defend the infringement claim and keep providing the product or service to them without interruption. This will cause you to have to settle up with the claimant or be subject to financial penalties from your customers.

You could do what most manufacturers of mass produced equipment do. Publish no manuals or schematics. Use OEM part numbers or burnish the part numbers off the chips. Won't make anyone on this newsgroup happy, but consumers won't have a clue.

Not only does that discourage someone from checking for a patent violation but it also discourages counterfeiters from copying the ripped off patent. Maybe call it IP-piracy- anti-piracy..??

D from BC snipped-for-privacy@comic.com British Columbia Canada

That's how it works. Whoever's pockets are largest, wins.

I'm guessing he would have said the stress was not worth the "bit of money" (relative to what could or should have been made from the idea anyway).

I'd also hazzard a guess to say that anyone who spends any appreciable time in court would rather spend that time again, poorer, out of court.

Except the lawyers of course. They win either way. Nice racket if you can get into it. And you're willing to give up your soul... :-)

Not quite the same, but related:

In Australia (and maybe elsewhere), it appears to be the trend: If your company is going down, the done thing is to bleed it dry, transfer your 'stuff' to areas the law can't touch, then jump ship.

When it hits the fan, and you're firmly fingered to be at fault, and dragged over the courts asking to pay up the xBillion (or xMillion, or xThousand, you get the idea), you throw up your hands and say "sorry, nothing left".

After several years in the clink, you come back to your wife, who was waiting with the two mansions in the exclusive suburbs (which aren't yours), six cars (which aren't yours) and assorted xInch plasma/lcd screens in every room (which aren't yours either), you get the idea. But not the holiday house. You lost that in court. You're left with the _other_ holiday house the courts couldn't finger as yours anymore. Turns out, you don't own anything at all. All the stuff you have is either "borrowed", or "leased". Sure, it USED to be yours, but not now. Not legally anyway, and that's the important bit.

They ALL cry poor, and all leave with more than their shareholders, customers or whoever paid for all that crap in the first place.

Corporate crime is a nice gig if you do it "right". And a bad name isn't always a barrier to following scams either.

As an interesting aside, those who know the ones who are crying poor, almost invariably note they've been in this racket for a while. They get away with it because not enough people know them to stay away.

If all else fails, you can get into politics. Ahem.

Yeah, but steal it and you'll get your ass kicked.

Cheers, James Arthur

Even if a no-searrching policy did exist, nobody would write it down because that would not look good. The problem is that if you do search then you will pretty much always find, and then your company probably has a policy that means that they will have to spend several days of lawyer's time deciding whether or not you really can put a resistor in series with the source terminal of a FET to make your current source, ala US6208125 for example. What was a 30 second circuit design task now has become three days of lawyer's time at $500/ hour.

BTW, a hobby of mine is bringing about the situation whereby typing the number of such a patent into the google search engine brings up a list of prior art as the first result, ahead of the actual patent. Unfortunately I haven't got around to this one yet, but the manual for the Wavetek 142 signal generator is probably a good start.

US6280125 see

Only if you work for a *really* stupid company. The cart is before your horse.

Yes. But your competitor will attempt to convince them that the defense will be fruitless and, one way or another, they will either end up paying for the legal costs (through increased price) or moving their business over to them.

In the professional contracting world where I work, scare tactics don't work as well. Patents aren't that big a deal (electrical power systems are kind of old hat by now) and the requirement to posses a PE license puts the spreading of FUD at odds with the profession's code of ethics.

The biggest problem tends to be that I end up as the recipient of communications, stating that some software tool I'm using violates some set of patents. And how I should dump my current applications and switch to theirs. My customers have nothing to fear, as it is practically impossible to trace the products of these tools to deliverables for my customers. A PDF is a PDF.

Well i must admit, i find it offensive to find that someone prints an expired patent, files it (with the expired patent number still on it) and it gets awarded. That is how broken the system is.

They could send Halliburton/Cheyney after you, if you don't have a patent ( not kidding)

martin

Call it the difference between earnest IP protection and dis-earnest IP protection. RAMbus kind of falls into the second category.

RAMbust falls in the protection racket category.