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Comment by philpem

6 years ago

There's a subtle-but-sneaky way to play this game.

Put in a patent application. Abandon it.

Congratulations, your patent is now going to come up in any competent patent examiner's initial search as "potential prior art".

Patent the core technology (the "you have to do it this way" stuff), but salt the earth around it so nobody can get a patent on the sub-optimal alternatives.

Also leave subtle but important details out of the application. Your conductive ink is silver but has to have, say, palladium added to make it stable? Forget to mention the palladium, and expand the claims to cover mixtures of different metals. See if the examiner allows it.

6 comments

philpem

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nAwYz  6 years ago

What you describe is the standard in some industries. If a research team discovers something new, lawyers will make a patent out of it that is broad / vague enough to prevent any further research in that area by competitors. At the same time they look at the patents of competitors and if they are too specific they try to patent similar ideas.

  • speedplane  6 years ago

    > If a research team discovers something new, lawyers will make a patent out of it that is broad / vague enough to prevent any further research in that area by competitors.

    Not quite right. If an inventor creates something marginally useful at a large company, there's no question that their lawyers will try to patent it. But the purpose is not to prevent research in the area, in fact the opposite. Once a company has a patent on something, they'd likely encourage further research, knowing that they have a financial interest in the research going to market.

    All big companies do this, and once the research matures enough to become a product, all the companies have modest claim to it, but they all have an interest to bringing it to market. In some cases, these companies fight who gets what in court (e.g., CRISPR), but in others, they come together and agree on a royalty scheme roughly proportional to their contributions (e.g., MPEG, H.264).

    The point is, no company patents something to stop research on that thing, it's quite the opposite.

speedplane  6 years ago

Sorry, but I don't think you fully understand how the patent system works. Examiners generally look at published patents and patent applications. Even though they theoretically can, they don't look at abandoned patents that were never published (generally called secret 102(e) art). Also, filing a true patent application is pretty expensive, minimum $5k to do it properly. There are inexpensive options, such as provisional patent applications which can be as low as ~$100, but examiners don't look at those either.

If you're worried about someone patenting something you created, and you don't care about getting your own patent protection on your invention, you'd likely get more mileage from publishing a detailed blog article than filing a patent application.