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On Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:10:11 +0100 "Robin Cornelius" <robin.cornelius@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > OT but its always a good topic here :-) > > What do/can you do if some one patents something that you have been > making for a long time before the patent was granted? You cannot sue (the law expects you to have patented it yourself), you can only complain and seek invalidation of the patent through the courts. > In this case the > patent was granted a few years a go now but the claims describe > something that we have done, and ourselves and others have published > scientific papers (IEEE and others) so there is no shortage of prior > art. > > In this case its a patent of a hardware system and truth be told, the > individual components of the system are trivial and obvious to anyone > in the field. > > It appears in the patent search report, that only EPO and World > patents were searched before granting? how the hell can this be right > what about scientific papers etc. This implys if its not in the patent > database its patatantable? (or at least the examiners will grant it). > > So what does this boil down to? if they are bigger than us and can > afford better lawyers than us we get stomped all over? That's about the sum of it. You'd need a patent lawyer to pursue this with the UKPO and then on to the EPO until your papers get into the patent database. The risk is that by going after them on this one, they'll pull out seven other patents and accuse you of infringing on those. Trash those and they'll come back with a dozen more and so on. Your company will go bankrupt from the legal costs, they'll purchase the technology from your liquidators (who are legally bound to get the best price for all the company assets) and then they'll own the prior art - claiming it was theirs all along. Patents of all kinds are a no-win situation. You either go bankrupt applying for patents in all countries that recognise them or you go bankrupt defending against those who *can* afford to patent things that aren't their own because the real inventors couldn't afford to. Get legal advice and then get financial advice. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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