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A New Species of Patent Troll
Geoffrey.landis writes "According to the Wall Street Journal, there's a new species of patent troll out there. These new trolls sue companies that sell products with an expired patent number on them. That's right, it's against the law to sell a product that's marked with an expired patent number. The potential fine? $500. Per violation. And some of the companies have patent numbers on old plastic molds that have made literally billions of copies. Using whistle-blower laws, 'anyone can file a claim on behalf of the government, and plaintiffs must split any fine award evenly with it.' You've been warned."
I actually blame the company. Packaging should have an expiry date built-in at a minimum. It's not like this is difficult to do: there are expiry dates on all dairy foods, and for good reason. Society benefits when people don't eat or drink food that's past expiry on a regular basis. Similarly, society benefits when the expiry date of a patent monopoly is clearly marked.
Companies still using an old mold which doesn't have an expiry date is just greedy. They should have put the date in when they went to the trouble of putting the patent number in, or they should bear the cost of a new mold if they're still selling new products from it.
An expired patent number on a product has positive social benefit. If anything, we should require the manufacturer to continue affixing the patent number to the product for a period after the patent expires. This lets you know how to reproduce the product, which you now have the right to do.
I don't know about the rest of you, but whenever I see a patent number on something interesting, I think, "OK, I can look that up and see when it expires". If they aren't allowed to keep putting the number there, the answer will always be "sometime in the future" as opposed to "x number of years ago".
In other words, if they aren't allowed to put the expired number there, it'll be harder to get the good news.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
An expired patent number on a product has positive social benefit. If anything, we should require the manufacturer to continue affixing the patent number to the product for a period after the patent expires. This lets you know how to reproduce the product, which you now have the right to do.
Yes. I think the law should be changed, so it's OK to affix an expired patent number, as long as you print the expiration by the number, for example "Pat No 1,234,567. Expires XX/YY/ZZ
Should not incur a fine, as long as the expiration date is included and truthful.
They aren't profiting from patents, they are profiting from abuse of patents, although you could argue that this abuse is generally small. There is some degree of public benefit from this and the only thing this discourages is improper patent labeling, which isn't really a good thing. This could make printing expiration dates the standard, which would actually be beneficial to the public.
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When I hear words and phrases like "simple", "trivial" and "a small matter of" it's usually a good indication that these minor trifles will be done (or paid for) by someone other than the writer.
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