4 ms·
You might be thinking of wilful infringement, which in some jurisdictions can significantly increase the penalties for infringing some types of IP rights. This
by Silhouette 9y ago
You might be thinking of wilful infringement, which in some jurisdictions can significantly increase the penalties for infringing some types of IP rights.
This in turn can lead to the perverse position that someone doing R&D in a certain field may be advised by their IP lawyer not to read existing research papers or patents, so that at least if they infringe and get sued, they can honestly say they didn't know and it wasn't wilful.
Of course this completely undermines the entire principle of publishing knowledge through academic papers, disclosing inventions through patents, and so on.
- gowld 9y agoNot really. The patent is filed with details so that when the patent expires, the design is ready to be disseminated freely without risk of legal challenge.
- Silhouette 9y agoAnd in the meantime, it is openly disclosed so that others can learn from it and potentially it is available for licensing if it or later inventions based on it are valuable enough. If you weren't going to do that, and you wanted to have a system that discouraged actually looking at what's already out there in case you infringed it knowingly, you might as well just let people file for anything but keep it secret for N years.