No, you absolutely do not. Generally speaking, you (as an inventor) only disclose any prior art you know of at the time of the filing. It is up to the PTO to find other (previously unknown) prior art during patent prosecution.
The exception to this is when you file a petition to "make special", which speeds up some parts of the process, but does place an affirmative burden on the applicant to do a prior art search.
As the other posts note, doing this on your own (without legal advice and against the wishes of your company), potentially opens you and your company up to willful infringement issues.
Very doubtful. First, a partner at a major law firm is going to use the firm's web address for any marketing / business (here, http://www.bakerlaw.com/), and not personal web address. Firms encourage all business-related activity to be officially through the firm, so any Google concerns would be for bakerlaw.com, not any personal domain. Second, an experienced trial lawyer (like I would presume Mr. Hunt, Esq. to be) would never engage in this particular moronic correspondence for two reasons -- (1) even if he was that moronic, he wouldn't have the time / patience to do it himself, and (2) he wouldn't written "I have also contacted my lawyer about this issue, so you should expect a letter in the post very soon" -- he would have come out with something far more confident and scary-sounding (even if horrendously misguided).
That would be great logic if not for the fact that the "preponderance of evidence" standard (usually used in civil cases) is much lower than "beyond a reasonable doubt" that a sex offender would actually have to be convicted of in a criminal action to get on a sex offender registry.
This reminds me of another snafu where "reply all" wasn't the culprit. A few years ago, I (and a lot of other people) received an email about some legislative point of interest from Congressman Joe Baca. (I have no idea how I got on this list).
As expected, everyone started replying to the sending email to say "remove me." The interesting part is that it turns out for convenience in sending, the mail admins had created the sending email address in such a way that any emails sent to the address automatically mailed the entire list again.
You can see where this is leading... Even those conscientious people who checked to not send as "reply all" where emailing the whole list en masse, and everyone started to get pissed off and emailing more responses to the originating address, which created more email...
After having enough of the flood of a good fifty emails, I figured out that the admins had set up the catch-all email that spammed the list upon receipt and contacted the department at UC Irvine to shut down the damn email. They apparently had never considered that having a publicly available email address that automatically forwards to a list of unsolicited addresses was a bad thing. But, at least they shut it down.
But my was the flame / response war funny when the emails turned to "don't hit reply all!", "I'm not using reply all!", etc.
Um, it's even easier than that -- enter "discovery," which is the procedure by which (once litigation has started) a patent litigant can demand every piece of evidence to demonstrate an infringing method / apparatus / etc. from the other side. Source code, internal memos, design spec's -- it's all discoverable except the very narrow range of attorney-client privileged documents.
Whats even funnier is they hired a lawyer who couldnt even get a decent judgement against microsoft for anticompetetive practices, after the introduced obviously fabricated evidence into court
I'm really tired of reading all of the flames of Boies regarding the Microsoft case and the Bush v. Gore decision. The tech-heavy, law-light readership of Slashdot seems to be unwilling to come to grips with the fact that Boies is a very talented attorney.
Boies has an extraordinary track record, both while he was at Cravath and after. The enormously high-profile cases he has taken can never be reduced to the skill of one (or even a group of) attorney(s) alone. The law deals with facts and other uncontrollable aspects that can serve to tank a case no matter how skilled the lawyer. Moreover, the law is an imperfect process at best.
Would you really be happy with a legal system that permitted attorneys to always wins, regardless of the facts of the case? While you consider that, also remember that Boies represented Napster in the 9th Circuit case (where he lost on dismissal, but did stay an injunction). Was the eventual loss Boies' fault? Or, maybe did some of the facts surrounding Napster's loose-cannon approach to copyrights and over-restrictive copyright laws have something to do with it?
Slashdot is understandably perturbed by the SCO deal. And, I believe that their case is utter crap. That's possibly a good reason to resent Boies for his choice in representing SCO. However, it's a far cry from claiming he's an incompetent lawyer.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you absolutely do not. Generally speaking, you (as an inventor) only disclose any prior art you know of at the time of the filing. It is up to the PTO to find other (previously unknown) prior art during patent prosecution.
The exception to this is when you file a petition to "make special", which speeds up some parts of the process, but does place an affirmative burden on the applicant to do a prior art search.
As the other posts note, doing this on your own (without legal advice and against the wishes of your company), potentially opens you and your company up to willful infringement issues.
No. Patent law has no requirement that you enforce your patent rights against known "infringers" (or what have you in this case).
Very doubtful. First, a partner at a major law firm is going to use the firm's web address for any marketing / business (here, http://www.bakerlaw.com/), and not personal web address. Firms encourage all business-related activity to be officially through the firm, so any Google concerns would be for bakerlaw.com, not any personal domain. Second, an experienced trial lawyer (like I would presume Mr. Hunt, Esq. to be) would never engage in this particular moronic correspondence for two reasons -- (1) even if he was that moronic, he wouldn't have the time / patience to do it himself, and (2) he wouldn't written "I have also contacted my lawyer about this issue, so you should expect a letter in the post very soon" -- he would have come out with something far more confident and scary-sounding (even if horrendously misguided).
That would be great logic if not for the fact that the "preponderance of evidence" standard (usually used in civil cases) is much lower than "beyond a reasonable doubt" that a sex offender would actually have to be convicted of in a criminal action to get on a sex offender registry.
By the way, IMO, if either of these things circumvent the patent then it's less useful than an equivalent weight of toilet paper.
Less useful, except of course for past monetary damages running at least back to 2001, which should fit well within the multi-million dollar range.
This reminds me of another snafu where "reply all" wasn't the culprit. A few years ago, I (and a lot of other people) received an email about some legislative point of interest from Congressman Joe Baca. (I have no idea how I got on this list).
As expected, everyone started replying to the sending email to say "remove me." The interesting part is that it turns out for convenience in sending, the mail admins had created the sending email address in such a way that any emails sent to the address automatically mailed the entire list again.
You can see where this is leading... Even those conscientious people who checked to not send as "reply all" where emailing the whole list en masse, and everyone started to get pissed off and emailing more responses to the originating address, which created more email...
After having enough of the flood of a good fifty emails, I figured out that the admins had set up the catch-all email that spammed the list upon receipt and contacted the department at UC Irvine to shut down the damn email. They apparently had never considered that having a publicly available email address that automatically forwards to a list of unsolicited addresses was a bad thing. But, at least they shut it down.
But my was the flame / response war funny when the emails turned to "don't hit reply all!", "I'm not using reply all!", etc.
Um, it's even easier than that -- enter "discovery," which is the procedure by which (once litigation has started) a patent litigant can demand every piece of evidence to demonstrate an infringing method / apparatus / etc. from the other side. Source code, internal memos, design spec's -- it's all discoverable except the very narrow range of attorney-client privileged documents.
Whats even funnier is they hired a lawyer who couldnt even get a decent judgement against microsoft for anticompetetive practices, after the introduced obviously fabricated evidence into court
I'm really tired of reading all of the flames of Boies regarding the Microsoft case and the Bush v. Gore decision. The tech-heavy, law-light readership of Slashdot seems to be unwilling to come to grips with the fact that Boies is a very talented attorney.
Boies has an extraordinary track record, both while he was at Cravath and after. The enormously high-profile cases he has taken can never be reduced to the skill of one (or even a group of) attorney(s) alone. The law deals with facts and other uncontrollable aspects that can serve to tank a case no matter how skilled the lawyer. Moreover, the law is an imperfect process at best.
Would you really be happy with a legal system that permitted attorneys to always wins, regardless of the facts of the case? While you consider that, also remember that Boies represented Napster in the 9th Circuit case (where he lost on dismissal, but did stay an injunction). Was the eventual loss Boies' fault? Or, maybe did some of the facts surrounding Napster's loose-cannon approach to copyrights and over-restrictive copyright laws have something to do with it?
Slashdot is understandably perturbed by the SCO deal. And, I believe that their case is utter crap. That's possibly a good reason to resent Boies for his choice in representing SCO. However, it's a far cry from claiming he's an incompetent lawyer.