Hi Ed: Good to have your thoughts expressed here... I am on at least 4 or 5 patents and several pending... some from my startup efforts and some from my stint at a Fortune-500 company.
RE: a patent being "granted based on false claims, it can be ruled to be unenforceable" Yes, that is true... I've had a fair amount of interaction with IP attorneys, and when reviewing their drafts of the patent applications, they wanted us to point out any possible 'stretching' of the truth or outright misunderstandings, and not just in the claims section. However, the burden of proof for false claims would be on the plaintiff, so proving false claims may be difficult to do to the satisfaction of the court. Perhaps the motivation for the LENR researchers is more $ to continue the research... there is no $ coming from govt which is typically where academia gets research $. Thus, the researchers have to go to the private sector and private investors are absolutely NOT going to invest in a company that doesn't have patent protection, so the researchers are simply doing what the $ sources are telling them they have to do. Although your argument that none of the LENR patents are enforceable anyway makes sense to most savvy investors, there are plenty of non-savvy investors who won't do the research necessary to give them sound legal advice about a given researcher's patent protection; or the LENR technology is so new that a patent review would not be able to definitively conclude that the patent is NOT enforceable... If the patent office strictly enforced the requirement that one must have a functional prototype, the number of patent applications would plummet... There was some SCOTUS decision about patent legislation several years back that significantly changed the patent regs, and one of the changes had to do with the application of a novel idea not being novel when simply applied to other industries. I.e., it raised the bar for the 'novelty' requirement back to what was originally intended. Let's take the example of wireless computer networking being incorporated into wireless EKG (medical) or wireless SCADA (industrial). Prior to the SCOTUS decision, these two examples would have been regarded as novel and thus, patentable; after the decision, the patent examiners are more likely to cite the wireless networking as prior art and arguing that adapting it to other areas is obvious to one skilled in the art. And they'd be correct... an engineer skilled in the art of wireless networking could easily adapt that novel technology to numerous other products from a plethora of different industries... I know... I've done it, and it is not novel. There may be some novelty in enhancements to the base wireless comms functionality, such as added security or noise-immunity, but only those enhancements would be patentable. This higher 'novelty-bar' can also be used by companies to argue for invalidation of a competitor's patent because it's not novel simply because it hasn't been done yet in their industry. In a previous life, Jones Beene was a patent attorney, so perhaps he can chime in here??? -Mark Iverson -----Original Message----- From: Edmund Storms [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2013 1:26 PM To: [email protected] Cc: Edmund Storms; [email protected] Subject: Re: [Vo]:Re: CMNS: from the dark side of LENR My understanding is that a patent is only valuable if it actually follows the rules. If the patent can be shown to have been granted based on false claims, it can be ruled to be unenforceable by the courts. In which case the inventor gets nothing. Meanwhile the inventor has spent a lot of money trying to defend the patent and any application of the idea has been slowed or stopped. One of the rules imposed by the USPO is that the patent must show how the claim can be replicated by a person skilled in the art. I know of no granted patent in the CF field that gives enough information for this requirement to be satisfied. In addition, the described demonstrations of heat production and the explanations can be argued were based on imagination alone rather than facts. This being the case, I would expect a series of lawsuits between patent holders in the future as they fight over which patent is valid. So, I ask, what is the purpose of trying to get a patent when the understanding is so primitive? In the past, patents were generally obtained after the basic process was understood, with the patent being used to describe a novel APPLICATION of a known phenomenon. This is not the situation with CF. The basic mechanism is not known and the location in the material that is active has not been identified. The patents are essentially describing magic without showing how the magic was done. I would like to hear from some patent holders about how they view this situation. Ed Storms On Jan 22, 2013, at 1:58 PM, a.ashfield wrote: > Rob Dingemans > "Of course an inventor is to be linked to the patent(s), so this > person can be seen as someone that has brought a (great) contribution > for the field.' > > Hard to live on your great contribution, particularly if you have > spent all your money and hocked your house to develop it. >
