3 ms·

Even if you can't sue Chinese manufacturers violating patents, very few products are bought directly from China then shipped to the USA. There are USA middlemen

• toss1 3y ago
  Sure, you can probably go after them for the US part of your market. But: First, it is very hard to get an early preliminary injunction to halt sales, so they keep selling against you the whole time. Second, the costs of pursuing a federal lawsuit are huge (typically six-figures+), it takes years to get to a judgement, and the result may be a pyrrhic victory where you are awarded damages and a cease-&-desist on a company that simply goes bankrupt and reorganizes under some other corp. entity. Sure, if they got into a major US retailer instead of you, you might get something, but then you are still going up against not only the competitor's attnys but also the major retailers, so probably add a zero to the left of the decimal in your legal costs. IOW, they still stole your IP, undermined your market, made money off of it, and suffered minimal penalties for doing so. We should also notice that SpaceX explicitly stated that they are going the trade secret route vs patents, and said that patents would simply be treated by the Chinese like an instruction manual, and they could never stop them or recover anything.