3 ms·

They should have to disclose the subsequent work if they want patent protection for that subsequent work, right?

• frenchy 5y ago
  Well lets say you have a process that requires stage A and then stage B to make product C, but stage B can't be done without A, and the result of B isn't useful by itself. Then you patent stage A and keep stage B secret. I'm not a patent expert, but this seems to break the social contract of patents. Perhaps there is something in the patent law that prevents this?
  • hcknwscommenter 5y ago
    Stage A must be provably useful, provably non-obvious, and provably new.
  • virgilp 5y ago
    [edit] Apparently, I'm wrong, "utility" is an explicit requirement. But let me tell you, nobody ever asked me to justify the utility, not even a little bit. I think it's just assumed that if you're willing to pay the patent fees, it's likely to have some utility. ---- AFAIK there's isn't. You can patent a leash for rodents, and PTO is not going to say "it's not acceptable, nobody wants to put rodents on a leash". The only questions are whether your invention is novel and non-obvious, not whether it's useful. As such, if you can patent stage A that produces <unuseful stuff B>, nobody will tell you that it's unacceptable because B isn't useful. The usefulness is a completely separate question, to be decided by the market.
  • tshaddox 5y ago
    A company could do that, but what advantage is there to doing that over simply keeping stage A a secret? By patenting stage A, you are awarded a temporary monopoly over stage A but also giving competitors a head start to reverse engineer stage B. By not patenting stage A, you don't get the temporary monopoly, but you also don't publicize anything about stage A that would give competitors the head start on stage B. So it's the same tradeoff that always exists with patents.