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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."
Who's the troll?
The company that invented the product, got their rightful patent, but their patent rights expired as they should, and is still using old packaging/molds/etc. that display the patent number and are now falsely claiming protection they don't have...
OR...
The lawyer who finds out about this violation of the law, and gets a finder's fee of $250 per product in violation distributed, and raises $250 per product in money for the government who definitely could use some help collecting this fine.
False patent claims can FUD a business away... but we also hate most lawyers here. Editors, please define which side to hate in all arguments. We /. commentators will crash if you execute Story.Comment without the required argument variable "$side".
Exactly. And - per the reason the patent system was set up - it allows you to more easily find the art to create the invention. You can find the original patent, which is supposed to be enough documentation to teach someone skilled in the art how to build the invention.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The emerging case law on this kind of action is putting the damper on a lot of get-rich-quick schemes. First, the potential damages are up to $500 per violation. Courts are not handing down massive damage awards; quite the opposite, in fact. It's likely that most of these cases will end up with damages assessed at some fractions of a dollar or even fractions of a cent per violation. $500 per violation is a cap on damages, not a target.
Second, the courts are setting a fairly high bar for the 'intent to deceive the public' element of false marking. The majority of these cases are the result of typos or failing to retool an assembly line the moment a patent expires.
I wonder if the wording was changed. "This product is protected by patents ######### until they expire"
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Bullshit.
/seriously/ interested in a product would simply look at it and give up. The company would certainly look up the patent to try to "get around it" and see that it had expired.
If a company was really interested in making a product, they'd check the relevant patent numbers online (which is pretty easy to do) and see that they had expired. No company that is
Stop making up scenarios that make no sense.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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"?
Stop making up scenarios that make no sense.
I am making a simplistic scenario.
/. are frothing at the mouth when companies use false DMCA takedown notices but apparently have no such anger directed at other companies using false patent information, we even defend them because of the "evil lawyers"?.
Why is it that we here at
Hypocrisy. You can't have your cake and eat it with this argument.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
All these suggestions of "print an expiration" miss one thing: utility patents in the US require maintenance payments, so the expiration date is not set in stone; if a company were to produce goods marked with the latest possible expiration date, then through malice, neglect, or simply a change in business plans, fails to pay a maintenance fee? Now you have products explicitly stating an expiration date some years after the patent has gone out of force.
A very simple solution is a sticker with all the patents. Since a bunch of stickers are usually applied to some product anyways, it's trivial to apply another sticker with the current patents that are still valid. Those that aren't valid anymore are either inked out, or a new set of stickers are commissioned (cheap).
The question is, though, at what point does it it count to be invalid? If I made a product, and it sits on a shelf for 5 years before it sells, at which point the patent expired, am I infringing? The patents in question were valid when it was manufactured, just it sat in some warehouse for an extended period of time (my warehouse, retailer warehouse, etc). Or what happens if it's the day before the patent expires? Technically it's still patented, but it won't be tomorrow...
In the case of a mold used to make plastics, stamp metal, ect., its incredibly expensive for a company to get a new mold made. I used to work at a CNC shop as a lowly peon preparing and finishing parts for military contracts, movie cameras and manufacturing molds. The company I worked for routinely charged big bucks for molds simply because it takes a large amount of skilled and unskilled man hours to produce it. An engineer typically did the initial design in some sort of CAD or other program, then the CNC machines were programmed to prepare the part. Then the part typically went through several CNC machines before being finished. After this the part's measurements were rigorously checked to see if there were within specifications. Then little turds like myself (I was a freshman in college) de-burred the sharp edges, put it through various chemical baths and polished the shit out of it before cleaning it one final time. The aforementioned is still a simplification of the process. Generally manufacturing molds were ordered only once. Suppose a patent expires. If a manufacturer chooses to have the patent number included in the mold at the get go, then they need to either modify the mold without decreasing the functionality of their product or they need to get a whole new mold made. A lot of times a company may only have one mold for a particular part, so the cost of any mistake in modification is large since it may mean totally replacing the mold. The point is that the company is not doing anything inherently wrong in using the mold to produce a product that they have been selling under a patent they either owned or licensed if the patent expired. It still references a patent number that can be looked up online to determine if its expired or not if someone chooses to spend the time. My point is ethical considerations need to be taken into account in enforcing this law, because the lawyers are only looking to score some cash at someone else's expense. To be unfair and use a logical fallacy, "Do you think this law is unjust or do you hate small businesses?".
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
TFA mentions 50 years, about 49 years and 364 days short of your "day after". Additionally, the law is on the manufacture of goods with incorrect patent labels, not the sale, so it doesn't matter how long it was in the store. What matters is if you are still making them.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI