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Admittedly I only did a couple of years of law school before switching but... ...surely any evidence of prior use of the patent arrangement to the patent is a
by ZenPro 12y ago
Admittedly I only did a couple of years of law school before switching but...
...surely any evidence of prior use of the patent arrangement to the patent is a get-out clause for anyone being charged with infringement.
I can claim originality of a printing press all I want right up until someone can prove a printing press as I designed it existed prior to my design.
90% of patent investigation is finding anything even remotely close to what you are being taken to court for infringing.
I am certain a whole repository of photographs exist that used this setup prior to the patent filing.
- Zigurd 12y agoOf course. But there is a huge asymmetry in that issued patents are presumed to be valid. There is no burden on a plaintiff to prove their patent is valid. The defendant has to separately sue to invalidate, and that costs at least a few $100ks per patent. There should be an administrative process to invalidate patents and a bounty for successfully pursuing such actions.
- darryl42 12y agoThe number Adam Carolla keeps using for defending against the pod casting patent is 1.5M. So far he has spent 60k on trying to get the venue changed, since neither he nor the patent holder lives in east Texas.
- dublinben 12y agoIt would be even better if the patent application process was adversarial. There should be an-equally robust argument against the validity of the patent at every step of the process.
- Zigurd 12y agoIn theory, they're not called patent examiners for nothing. In practice, you can patent a white background.