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How to Become a Patent Millionaire
An anonymous reader writes "SF Gate has an article about people who patent ideas for things they have no intentions of building, hoping to license technology or block competitors from doing something similar. As if the patent system weren't screwed up enough already."
Lemelson did not invent the bar code. In fact he engaged in practices very similar to the ones described in the article. His patent was an extremely generic one for machine vision applications, which according to his interpretation covered bar code readers. He was one of the people who never implemented any of their ideas, preferring to wait for other people to reinvent them and then ask for royalties.
Inventors patent ideas to pre-empt their rivals
Companies then must buy rights to the devices
Benjamin Pimentel, Chronicle Staff Writer Monday, June 9, 2003
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Dennis Fernandez has come up with an idea for TV sets with built-in cameras and small screens that would let viewers talk to one another while watching a show.
"Let's say we're both watching a 49ers game," said the 42-year old Menlo Park attorney. "You and I will show up in this bubble picture. You'll have a head shot, and I'll have a head shot, and we're talking to each other during the game. It's as if you and I are in a virtual chat room watching the same broadcast event."
Fernandez has every intention of actually building such a device. He says the idea was his -- even though he has no certificate from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to prove it.
If he decides to build a product based on the idea, he might have to buy the patent, pay a licensing fee or face the patent owner in court.
It's part of a legal tactic called "intellectual property" in which businesses or individual entrepreneurs use patents as tools to build new products, not as legal roadblocks or bargaining chips against competitors or corporate giants.
Some legal experts, including those representing big corporations, are skeptical of this approach, which they say is impractical because of the enormous leverage that patent litigation affords.
Still, the tactic underscores the growing importance of patents as a competitive weapon in the technology industry, as demonstrated by the recent $35 million judgment in favor of a Virginia inventor who sued EBay for alleged patent infringement. Inventor Tom Woolston accused the San Jose online auction operator of using programs he developed for processing certain sales.
Typically, patent attorneys help companies patent technologies to protect them from rivals. Fernandez, who is also an electrical engineer and inventor, and other Silicon Valley attorneys are taking a more aggressive approach: They discourage clients from analyzing their rivals' technology and trying to obtain patents to make it harder for them to move forward.
"It's less valuable to have a patent that covers your competitor's products (rather) than your products," Fernandez, founding partner of Fernandez & Associates in Menlo Park.
Peter Eng, a senior associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a Palo Alto law firm, said that while most patent attorneys would simply cover what a client is working on, "those with foresight think ahead and predict where others may or may not go."
THE BRICK WALL
John Ferrell, founding partner of Carr & Ferrell in Palo Alto, likened a patent portfolio to a brick wall.
"What I advise my clients to do is to analyze their competitors' road maps, " he said. "Successful companies become successful by spending time thinking about competitors and avoiding the competitor's recognized intellectual property rights."
He cited the standards of Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) technology, in which transmission speeds have been rapidly advancing during the past three years from 11 megabits per second in 1999 to more than 50. Wireless firms expect the standard to reach more than 100 megabits per second soon.
"There will be technical challenges, so one way we might use our patent portfolio is we might sit down with our smart guys to figure out what we need to do," Ferrell said.
The company can then apply for patents on it's own inventions. An applicant must prove to a patent examiner in written statements and with drawings and diagrams that the invention is novel and original. But the applicant doesn't have to come up with a prototype.
"You don't have to build it," Ferrell said. "You just have to conceive it. By filing a couple of patents, you essentially have protected your idea. Anybody who wants to go from G to X has to get through your toll road."
Fernandez said that because his
There is one thing I learned some time ago about the french law on patents, and that times it is good news : according to these laws, if some organization buys a patent and has not begun to commercialize something in a given lapse of time after that (two years, if I remember well), the patent author gets his rights back :-)
That forbids a corporation to buy a patent just to bury it; the legislator here estimated that such a thing did not go in the way of public interest.
I do not know how it is in other countries, european or not.
Not having patents on software or algorithms is a good thing for mankind as a whole, I am pretty sure of that, but probably not for the inventors themselves. Don't you think abnormal that the inventors of the Fast Fourier Transform never got a cent for their invention (which was a bright one) from the people who use it daily, and even sell devices using their algorithms ? Did not Boyer and Moore deserve something from the community for their clever string-search algorithm? And what about Quicksort?
I guess that if software and algorithm patents are forbidden, something should be put into place so the human community recognizes contributions of great value, and rewards them accordingly. As there are perhaps not more than one or two VERY bright ideas (like Boyer-Moore's) each year, or at most a score of them, this should be a manageable thing.
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
also remember that the purpose of the patent system is to encourage inventors to come up with new ideas and then publish them. without a patent system, every new invention would be treated as a trade secret. for example, you'd buy a television or computer with sticker on the box saying (or trying to say) that opening the box is a violation of the manufacturer's trade secret.
properly employed, patents eliminate the requirement to reverse engineer products because the complete schematics of how the products work are already published in the government's patent database. one of the problems with the patent system is that the courts screwed it up by saying only a lawyer is qualified to say whether a patent has been infringed. this has put published active patents off limits to the engineers who would actually use them.
imagine, for example, if the wright brothers had not been allowed to patent the airplane. they would have never published the wing warping technique, leaving it to other inventors to rediscover it independently. whenever they sold an airplane to someone, they would have to force a contract on the customer forbidding the customer from reverse engineering the machine.
interstingly, all these things are parts of eulas because software developers are not required to publish copyrighted software code. copyrighted code is essentially treated as if it were a trade secret.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
Patent examiners generally start at the GS-7/9 grades making roughly 50-60k a year. Promtion can be rapid, and it is possible to make 90k a year before bonuses/overtime. There was a pay increase several years ago to keep examiners from quiting to work in the private sector as patent agents.
http://www.popa.org/newsletters/julaug00.shtml
Patent examiners are paid on GS scale with specailly 1224, it tops out around 120k for a gs15/10. Attorneys generally make around 100k to start and go up to around 400k.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
IANAL but IWAPE (I was a Patent Examiner (Damn, there goes any credibility I might have had)) but I think most patent infringment/validity trials are (or, at least, were) held in front of a US District Court Judge without a jury who makes rulings on both law and facts. A trial before a jury, however, is an option available to the accused infringer (defendant).
And what would happen if Mr. Curtiss had been an inventor working out of a bike shop, and didn't have the funding to fight the (now successful) Wright brothers legally?
And, finally, the situation wasn't settled by the courts. The Army nationalized ALL the patents and licensed ALL of them freely to anybody who wanted to build airplanes.
Patents exist for the sole purpose of encouraging technological development by rewarding innovation.
Particularly in emerging technologies, a ten-year court battle can make technology development stagnate.
A good book on the subject is supposed to be "Unlocking the Skies" by Seth Schulmann. I have it on hold at my library, but I've yet to read that particular account.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
U.S. Patents do expire after given periods of time if the periodic maintenance fees aren't paid. For lone inventors with unmarketed/unmarketable inventions, these fees often go unpaid and the patent expires.
That, unfortunately, doesn't help in your situation, where your invention is previously described by another. The prior patent, whether enforceable or not, is likely still prior art against your invention. If the previous patent(s) really are that close to your invention and are adequately described in the written description (not the claims*), then you need to come up with a modification that is both novel and nonobvious over them.
*Many people are unaware that the claims of prior patents are not considered by the USPTO Examiner when considering whether an issued patent can be applied as prior art against a pending application.