I am not sure about what you said about Prior art. When I was working in a patent department for a company prior art is anything in the public domain, including patents. Most of the US patent examiners cite older patents as prior art then say your application is not new and novel. Then you have to argue that there is a difference. If you keep an idea as a Trade Secret, you may suffer from it being patented. The idea of granting a letters patent was to give a person certain rights to the idea if the person disclosed the idea to expert workers in the field.
What has happened is that well financed corporations have managed to twist the original intent and laws to suit themselves. It took a long time and a lot of effort to patent computer ideas. With which I disagree, as no one should be able to patent a mathmatical expression. Chris On 29/05/07, Colin Sharpe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
--- James Knott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Even assuming you could successfully search all > patents, what about prior art that hasn't been > patented? As I recall, someone managed to patent > the wheel a while back. Then there are inventions > that have been patented elsewhere... Patent searching software is pretty well developed these days. Prior art is, by definition something which has been done and not patented, which I wrote in my post. In many cases keeping something a "Trade secret" is a more effective protection than filing a patent. Of course, if someone tries to patent your "Trade secret", you would have a cast iron "Prior art" defence against a patent holder who tried to sue you, since you could show that you had been using whatever the patent covers long before the patent was awarded. Colin. ____________________________________________________________________________________Take the Internet to Go: Yahoo!Go puts the Internet in your pocket: mail, news, photos & more. http://mobile.yahoo.com/go?refer=1GNXIC --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
