Would 'Patent Pending' Discourage YOU?

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I love to give ideas away--that's part of why we come here to SED, isn't it? We trade ideas. That's fun. But if ideas are your only work, who among us can afford to give away all of their work, and live for free?

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You can compete on service, but then you're in the commodity service business. Like, I could give away electronic designs, but charge for PCB layout. That kind of reduces the incentive to learn electronic design though, doesn't it?

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For that matter we could all market and sell imported products, couldn't we? But isn't our value to society in making things better, faster, and cheaper, not just making the same thing as the other guy, but with a bigger smile?

Innovation, or, productivity more particularly, that's what improves the lot of the whole.

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Yes, there are other factors that enter into being successful, and it's possible to succeed on those alone. But it's sometimes a bonus to know that other people won't be able to immediately copy a gadget you just spent two years' time and treasure inventing & perfecting.

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P.T. Barnum was an optimist.

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We invented some cool stuff, then licensed it. It took about two years' fiddling around in the soup to get to the 3 or 4 breakthroughs that made the whole thing possible. Of course looking backward they seem simple and obvious--the best ideas always do. If we'd had those to start with we could've saved two years, a lot of heartache, and a couple million today-dollars.

Several existing players actively tried to steal our stuff. Scoundrels, they.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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That's not what I meant. I meant that they're the low-cost supplier, and the logical home of the new guy manufacturing something YOU thought of, but failed to patent.

That's not what you originally said. I'm not accusing, just talking facts.

Even if you revise your comments to say you simply have a low expectation of success, the very submission of an application is implicitly a representation to the Patent Office that you have a valid invention, and you're applying for the purpose of legitimately protecting that invention.

Submitting an application for some other purpose abuses that process. That's considered 'acting in bad faith.' They've probably got a law against that too, somewhere.

If you have no intention of following through but a legitimately patentable invention, well, that's one to ponder.

True.

If you want to game the system, game on. No one's stopping you. The stated purpose was misdirection--filing a sham application to make competitors think you're getting a patent, when you have no such intention. Is it honest? No, of course not. Legal? Probably not. Will they prosecute you? Probably not. Do people do it? Yes, they probably do.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Why can't you just up and say, "patent pending"? You're going to file as soon as you get a round tuit - that sounds like "pending" to me. ;-D

Cheers! Rich

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Yeah, I'm still on the fence about whether it's even worth it to file a provisional just so one can claim patent-pending status. It appears to have very little buyer-motivation power, and an unknown amount of would-be competitor deterrence.

And since it's so niche, where else, if not from me, might my prospective buyers even get such a thing? Patent-pending or not?

There is another wrinkle we didn't discuss, that may have some bearing on legitimacy - The USPTO offers "commercial success" as one way to overcome an objection based on obviousness. Presumably, the argument goes that if a new invention is so well received in commerce, it must solve a long-standing, but unfelt need - and therefore must be something new. (Or, it could represent aggressive advertising, but I digress..)

The USPTO considers commercial success to be an indicator of non- obviousness, and they have ascribed much weight to certain such successes in the past. (Not that I'm saying my new widget will ever prove successful enough to qualify for that argument, but there it is.)

Thanks for all the input.

-mpm

But which jurisdiction are we talking about here?

What if I file a provisional app offshore somewhere with lax requirements and low fees and then mark my product "PATENT PENDING"?

I'm not lying. I may eventually follow up the application and be granted a patent. And who knows, with the proper offshore location and the USAs propensity for foisting IP treaties on everyone else, it may turn out to have the same force of law as a US patent.

Why, the United Socialist States of America (USSA) will look after our every need, James... from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, right?

:-)

Just kidding. I completely agree -- clearly if your job is tightly tied to the generation of good ideas, it doesn't behoove you to give them all away. I seem to recall that folks like Larkin and Jim Thompson have occasionally mentioned that they keep some of their best cards close to the chest.

I suspect a lot of people make the mistake of believing they have truly unique ideas that are going to make them a fortune when, in actuality, there isn't that much new under the sun and in most cases much larger factors in running a successful business are your work ethic, customer service, your efficiency, location, etc. Indeed, most new businesses are just evolutions of traditional ones anyway (rather than true "breakthrough" new technologies) -- the whole Internet boom (including Zuckerberg's Facebook) was largely about pretty straightforward transitioning of traditional businesses into on-line versions. Seems to have worked well for, um, facebooks, auctions (eBay), books (Amazon)... but not so well for, say, pet care products (pets.com), grocery delivery (webvan.com), etc.

The movie Startup.Com is an interesting story of GovWorks.Com -- their ostensibly-good-idea died because of too much infighting and the inability to get their software to work properly (even though, I mean, how hard is it to build a web site that processes parking tickets, you know?).

Sorry, when I said "service" I meant "customer service" insofar as building a reputation for deliverying on-time and on-budget -- there's no shortgage of companies that *don't* do this, and hence (in theory) they're relatively easy to compete against.

Yeah, and plenty of people do.

Yes it is.

Yep!

---Joel

Some little island nation, like Aruba or somewhere, ought to issue patents for $10, no questions asked. Then everybody could stamp "PATENTED" on their stuff.

John

China will do it for free....

$15-20K USD legal & translation fees is typical for a foreign company, though the gov't filing fee is only the equivalent of a couple hundred dollars IIRC.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

A neighbour who has 30+ patents used to write "Patent App" on his work, usually before filing anything. Deliberately ambiguous as to whether it meant "Applied for" or "Approved". "Pending" has a legally-defined meaning, unlike "App".

Doesn't work that way..if no filing was done, and interference happened, he could not go to court for relief due to lack of proof.

Would be legally worthless as it could not be sucessfully litigated in other countries.

..because then they could duplicate the tech and create look-alike patents. Seen it happen.

Naturally.

John

I would be discouraged in one respect and ENCOURAGED to make an improvement and get a patent on it in another respect.

To get "Patent Pending" the cheapest way is to get a provisional patent. It costs $110 not $100. If you say you have a patent and it is not true AND someone wants to be a dick they can sue you.

COnsider the 2 CalTech grad students who came up with an idea to link GPS addresses to their neighborhood and make a web application to see houses in the neighborhood. Turns out Google thought of the same thing AFTER the gradstudents spent $110 getting a provisional patent. Pretty simple and cheap, for $110 these guys are set to rake in billions from a licensing agreement with Google for Street View.

Anyway, if you have an idea then by golly get a provisional patent. See the top 10 reasons here.

Thanks,

Dave

--------------------------------------- Posted through

Yeah, boy, I seem to have put my foot in it again. I googled "what does 'patent pending' mean?" (with quotes around 'patent pending') and it turns out that there's some kind of regulation.

So, I learned something today - I guess I can go back to bed! ;-)

Thanks! Rich

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phone: (928)428-4073

Been there long tine Yank. Still there.

That old falsified "country of origin" markings urban myth. I'll bet snopes.com debunks it. The goods would be seized by US customs if they noticed.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany