Posts Tagged: "famous inventors"

Patent searches are excellent learning tools because they give you an opportunity to discover which aspects of your invention are most likely to contribute to patentability, thereby allowing the description in any filed patent application to focus on those aspects most likely to contribute to patentability. Without a patent search you would just be describing all the various aspects of your invention as if they are equally important, which we know won’t be the case… Not only do patent searches allow for focus to be placed on what is different and most likely patentable, but if knock-out prior art is found then the expensive a patent application has been saved.

At the request of the Federal Trade Commission, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida has issued a preliminary injunction against World Patent Marketing, an invention promotion company the FTC has charged with being nothing more than a scam. “The record supports a preliminary finding that Defendants devised a fraudulent scheme to use consumer funds to enrich themselves,” concluded United States District Judge Darrin P. Gayles. “Accordingly, the Court finds a preliminary injunction is necessary to maintain the status quo pending a trial on the merits.”

In a New Hampshire State Superior Court, this so-called ‘patent troll’ has decided to fight back. Automated Transactions and Dave Barcelou have filed a defamation complaint against the crème de la crème of those deemed “too big to fail” and who many might consider to be too big to defeat… The minute Barcelou was able to enforce his patented technologies in court, winning a sizable settlement from the biggest bank in his hometown of Buffalo, NY, a veritable “Who’s Who” of the financial services leaders joined forces to destroy both Barcelou and his company economically. Besides encouraging one another to ignore Automated Transaction’s demand letters, false and misleading statements started to appear in prominent business publications, which went so far as to say the company had purchased its patents, or alternatively, that the patents were invalid. Over time a unified battle cry arose from the ‘poor little community banks’ he allegedly targeted; “He’s nothing but a patent troll.”

High novelty, high non-obviousness standard, inconvenient court venue for patent owners, and limited availability of injunction remedies, reduced damages, threaten liabilities will hurt all classes of inventors except that it has less impact on corporate inventors. The invalidation procedure will discourage inventive activities of all classes with most serious impacts on independent inventors and accidental inventors. This is one biggest class of inventors who often come up with game-changing and surprising inventions. When would-be-inventors run into problems or solutions, why would they spend time and money to make inventions, spend more money to get patents, and get the business to defend patents in endless invalidation actions? High patent quality standard forces existing professional inventors to leave their invention business and discourage young people from becoming future inventors. In this highly uncertain time with a large number of dormant epidemic diseases, one or a few inventions may save population life when vaccine is unavailable.

I am frequently asked by inventors whether they should file a patent application before seeking to license their invention. Some even ask whether they should first obtain a patent before they submit the invention to a licensing company… I always tell inventors and entrepreneurs that the best invention to patent is one you will make money with regardless of whether you ultimately obtain a patent. After all, if there is not a market for the invention why would you ever consider spending the time and money to obtain a patent? The goal is to make money and investing in a business or to obtain a patent makes sense only if there is a reason to believe more money will be made than spent.

Patent reformers argue that too many patents can hurt business, and low-quality patents cause problems. Their lobby activities have successfully persuaded the Congress to pass the AIA, with the primary purpose to raise patent quality…. The patent office uses all patent rules in an even-handed manner to all applicants. So, it treats corporate applicants and U.S. individual applicants in the same way: entering frivolous rejections, using one-way bias high patent quality standard, giving the same opportunity to demand inter-party review (by paying $23,000), and affording the same opportunity to defend a challenge to patents (which would consume hundreds of thousands of dollars of attorney fees). Nobody can question those rules.  However, this money-can-buy fairness practices have distorted technological landscape. Frivolous rejections can force individual inventors to abandon their applications, but do not affect giant foreign corporations; outrageous fees and maintenance fees can discourage individual inventors, but will not affect foreign corporations; and the right of harassment can be used by all corporations but not U.S. independent inventors.

Intellectual property is distinguished from “real property” because the property itself exists in our heads and needs to be “created” through a process of description and examination. If approved and granted, your property is described in a proxy form such as a patent, copyright registration, or trademark registration. There is no livery of seisin ceremony. You cannot walk the property line of your patent or plant a garden in your copyright registration. To get a patent, you have to create.

Like anything in life that is new, whether it be returning to exercise after a lengthy hiatus or learning a new language, you have to walk before you can run. Put one foot in front of the other. Too often I see inventors who come up with the idea and want to cut through the middle steps and file a patent application. If they skip the middle steps then they likely don’t have an invention, they can get frustrated and give up… The moral of the story is that inventing is not rocket science; inventors are those with persistence and a plan. Spend time little by little working the idea, describing what you have in text, thinking about the various alternatives and then get some drawings. This step by step approach to inventing will get you from idea to invention, putting you in possession of all the information you will need to file a patent application and attract customers and potential licensees.

Inventor, Beatrice Hicks, is both a 2017 inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame as well as one of America’s truly trailblazing women engineers, one of the first to enter the field of technological development in the mid-20th century. Hicks would go on to become instrumental in the founding of the Society of Women Engineers and her story is a wonderful reminder of the power of both a good education and the ability to believe in one’s self… Hicks’ major innovation in gas sensor tech is outlined by U.S. Patent No. 3046369, titled Device for Sensing Gas Density and issued July 24th, 1962. It claimed, in a density system, a chamber containing gas, a hollow case with an interior cavity in communication with the chamber, a sealed expansible and contractible bellows mounted within the hollow case and in communication with gas contained in the chamber, and an actuating portion to actuate an output means when the bellows moves to a critical position in response to the pressure-versus-temperature function of the gas.

When we apply for a patent, we are sharing our secret, our discovery, with the world. In exchange for sharing our secret we are promised 20 years of exclusive rights, a promise signed and sealed by the Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. But with the PTAB, it means nothing. No guarantee. No warranty. Arguably a fraud. It will be revoked – by the same agency that issued it – at least 90 percent of the time.

The first thing to understand is that there is no such thing as contingency representation for purpose of preparing, filing and ultimately obtaining a patent. Patent attorneys and patent agents simply do not take contingency clients when the matter is patent procurement… Most inventors hate hearing this, but inventing is the easiest part of the entire process. This seemingly outrageous statement is perfectly accurate because inventing is the only part of the process that can be completely controlled. Once the invention is complete control shifts away from the inventor to others, like patent examiners and consumers, market forces take effect and even good inventions wind up being commercial failures.

“I can tell you, every day Congress is in session there are lobbyists here trying to weaken the patent system,” Massie explained. In Massie’s words, those companies that come to Capitol Hill and lobby to weaken the patent system want to get into new fields, but the problem is they didn’t invent in those fields, so they face problems. Patent problems. A lot of those companies want to become automobile manufacturers, or cell phone manufacturers, or they want to write software for operating systems, but they didn’t invent in those areas and they don’t own the patents that have historically been the touchstone of innovation ownership. “They’d love to just come in and start playing in those fields and start using their size and scale as an advantage, and to them, patents look like a hindrance,” Massie explained. “They are here in Congress looking to weaken patents and they are not just interested in weakening patents issued in the future, they are looking to weaken all patents.”

The crux of this so-called adequate description requirement is that once the first four patentability requirements are satisfied the applicant still must describe the invention with enough particularity such that those skilled in the art will be able to make, use and understand the invention that was made by the inventor. For the most part this requirement can be explained as consisting of three major parts. First is the enablement requirement, next is the best mode requirement and finally is the written description requirement.

It’s safe to say that most sectors will undergo significant disruption as a result of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. AI will not only disrupt our business models but it will also disrupt our legal framework for the creation and exploitation of intellectual property (IP) rights, giving rise to new IP challenges for those seeking to develop and deploy new AI systems.

The nonobviousness requirement is a critical element to patentability. In essence, even if the applicant can demonstrate patentable subject matter, utility and novelty, the patent will not issue if the invention is trivial. In order to determine if an invention is trivial it is necessary to see if there was motivation in the prior art to do what the inventor has done, or if there is some reasonable expectation that the combination of elements would achieve a successful result. If the prior art does not explicitly, and with identity of elements, teach the invention, the patent applicant may still be thwarted if there are a number of references that, when combined, would produce the claimed invention.