[ARSCLIST] Patents again

[James Lindner <jim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I believe you have one year after public disclosure to file. I suspect that
if you were very serious about it you could work on the claims and structure
the patent application in such a way that it would be a new disclosure not
based on earlier disclosures that you may have made. That is one of the
things patent attorneys do.


It is an expensive and time consuming process - frequently people choose to
keep processes as trade secrets to protect their intellectual property
because one of the down sides - is that by definition a patent is a full
disclosure. Sometimes (and this may be one of those times ) enforcing and
getting license fees or royalties is not worth the effort - and so the time
and money associated with getting the patent never really pays back - other
then the pride in having gotten one - it is a very neat accomplishment.


We are in that process now for our SAMMA system. We have already filed
preliminary and are working on the rest which will be filed - probably in
the spring. There are elements that are in the patent application that are
fully disclosed - but other elements that we choose not to patent and retain
as a trade secret - so there is noting stopping any inventor from having a
strategy that uses a couple of different approaches depending on the
specifics. Sometimes people disclose the main elements and keep the "secret
sauce" a trade secret because it can be easily copied and hard to enforce or
license.
Sometimes visa versa- people patent a specific tiny part of an entire
process - knowing that you cannot go forward without using that patent - so
it becomes part of a "patent fence". The whole thing isn't patented - but
the tiny elements are.

There are many areas that have these patent fences - for example in the
Telecine "field" there are many patents and I believe it would be hard to
build one without running into a couple of them one way or another.
Sometimes manufacturers specifically use an older technology to avoid a
patent. At one point Sony was selling a telecine that had a Bell and Howell
movement in it. This was a very expensive system - and why there may have
been several reasons for using the approach they used - one of them MAY have
been to avoid the patents in that specific area. I wasn't there so I don't
know - but sometimes you find anachronisms in products and wonder in essence
"now why did they do that??" - and sometimes the answer is because of a
patent that is easier to go around then to license.

So for example you might not be able to patent the cold desiccation process
you speak of - I am not sure what it is - but you may be able to patent the
use of a particular desiccant class to be used for this specific application
of it by putting it in a certain container or treatment process. This is
precisely what Kodak did for Molecular Sieves. They could not patent a new
desiccant - it wasn't. What they patented was using that specific desiccant
specifically in film cans for the vinegar syndrome. Your process might in
fact even need to reference the Kodak Patent. When Kodak got that patent -
in 6 months after filing - a record probably - (but companies like Kodak
have whole departments that just do patent applications and are VERY good at
getting things through_..... I was surprised. If you read it - the patent
could probably be challenged on several fronts. I doubt anyone has because
unless you wanted to go into the molecular sieve business - why bother?

Well enough on patents - I am not an attorney and am not offering any advice
at all. Just idle banter.
jim

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        Jim Lindner
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