Considering the source I feel its pretty much unadulterated BS but it brought up a question in my mind.
Having been recently exposed to a certain flavor of mlm’er who claims that the food supplements they are pitching “hold government patents which means they have to do what the company says they do”
Is there any testing or verification done by patent registration as to the effectiveness or feasibility of a patented product, or does it just have to be unique and make sense to someone?
Perpetual motion machines can’t be patented. Ideas which other people have patented can’t be patented. Ideas which aren’t original can’t be patented.
But I believe that it is possible to patent something that doesn’t work. Certainly you don’t need to give a demonstration to anyone at the patent office. And also certainly, you can patent things that are theoretically possible, but currently impossible.
I suspect that even if there was no reason to think something was even theoretically possible that it would get a pass–but that would be more as a matter of convenience on the part of the patent office. It’s easier for them to do up the paperwork for a device that can’t work than to try and get you to prove it does work. You have to pay to have something patented, and all that gives you is the right to sue someone who makes a product using your technology. But if your technology is impossible, no one can ever make a device that uses it. Hence, it really doesn’t matter to the patent office.
This is based on my reading from having submitted two patents. I am not a patent lawyer.
Are you sure about that? With my patents, I had to describe how they work.
You do have to describe how they are intended to work. But I’ve definitely read about successfully registered patents that depended on materials that didn’t exist yet. For instance, “If ever there comes to be a material with a tensile strength of XXX and a weight of YYY per cubic centimeter…then we can create something like this!” And just because you can explain how, for instance, dowsing rods work via “ionic flatulance waves” to discover water and metals–that still doesn’t mean that they actually work. Just means you were able to write something that’s too much of a hastle for the patent office to disprove.
And now that I’m home from work and can do some further searching… The only limit I’ve found so far on the Wikipedia is as such:
[
](Sufficiency of disclosure - Wikipedia)
So essentially, the problem is less in patenting the device, and more in being able to defend the validity of the invention if it is challenged.
So although you may have been issued a patent, it may still be entirely possible to take it to court and prove that the invention is impossible to implement as described, based on your own expertise in the field.
My question would be what exactly is the company claiming the products do?
Most “food supplements” I have seen make such claims as, “May reduce your blood pressure.” “May promote prostate health.” “When combined with proper nutrition and exercise may produce weight loss.”
So if your food supplement contains Vitamin C, and the company claims it may stregnthen your immune system, then they can most likely back that up. There have been many clinical studies about effects of taking Vitamin C. So if a product contains Vitamin C, it may very well effect your immune system. But most companies still can’t claim their product will most definately boost your immune system because that specific product hasn’t been through the clinical studies to prove it.
If they are making claims that a product will cure arthritis, or cancer, or allergies then that is something they can’t back up. In order to make claims like that there is a very specific process they must go through to prove that. And I am pretty sure if something was out there that has been proven to cure cancer, then it wouldn’t be sold through an MLM.
So I don’t think it has so much to do with the patents, but the legality of what the makers of food supplements can claim.
Personally, I take food supplements and do feel they help reduce the pain of my rheumatoid arthritis. From about the time I was 16, each year my hands would get progressively worse. At 26 I started taking supplements and my hands have not gotten worse. I am very happy about that because I had been told I would likely lose the use of my hands like my mother and grandmother by the time I was 40. But from the way I understand the law, I can not tell you if you take the same thing I take, you will get the same results. There is no proof that what I take is responsible for my arthritis being in remission, so I can not claim it is.
In fact, if in this post I mentioned my real name, and the name of the product I take, and say what I just said about how it helped me, the company who I distribute products for would write me a letter of warning. They would tell me what I said, even though it was just my own experience with the product, was too close to making medical claims and I had to stop or would be terminated.
If this MLM is making false claims, your friend needs to know the FDA could shut them down. If the MLM’s literature makes the ok kind of claims, like saying it may promote, may decrease, may lead to…but your friend is then taking that a step further and claiming things that are not proven, then the MLM he is associated can and should terminate his distributorship. Some MLM’s don’t take the rules of what you can and can’t claim as serious as others. In fact, some encourage distributors to make claims. But I view those as companies who are looking to make a quick buck and if they get shut down, they can just start all over again with a new name. I wouldn’t want to be associated with a company like that and would be very leery of their products.
So I would suggest you take a good look at what the company is claiming the products do, and then compare with what your friend is claiming they do. If either of those is claiming a cure, or a specific definate positive outcome that has not been clinically proven, then that is the problem, and it really doens’t have anything to do with the patent.
A couple of my patents were just write ups of ideas - I never built them and proved they worked.
Okay. I am curious, what have you patented?
As far as the OP goes, I don’t think that patented items have to work. IIRC, there was some sort of snake oil weight loss remedy advertised on TV that claimed to be a patented formula, but I doubt the stuff worked too well, and it is no longer advertised AFAIK.
My wife worked for an MLM company whose flagship product has two U.S. patents for lowering cholesterol without a prescription. It also claims that research demonstrates the product’s effectiveness (we never checked the research ourselves). Nevertheless, I never heard it claimed by anyone that the patents, in and of themselves, were any type of proof that it worked. That’s what the research was for. I got the impression that the patents spoke more to the uniqueness of the mechanism.
I suspect some overeager and undereducated person in this particular distributorship line has made an erroneous assumption and is passing it off as fact. That phenomenon is exceedlingly prevalent in MLMs, in my observation.
So if you care to pursue the matter, ask for research references. And don’t be surprised if the people in the distributorship ignore the truth about what the patent does and doesn’t mean.
Actually under the rules, the claim need not be false for the FDA to act, it merely need be misleading. I have no case sites to tell you how to distinguish the two.
I took a gander at the website for the company, Reliv, it makes all of the proper conditional statements. The distributor in my networking group loves to preach on extolling the virtues of the product citing “proven results” in everything from cancer and diabetes to depression, ADD, asthma, I should record her spiel this next meeting and post it for y’all.
One my favorite quotes, “it has everything a human cell needs”.
My thoughts…
"What glucose? A few stray amino acids…oxygen? What kind of cell?
Having worked in a medical profession and initially starting off as a bio major in college, these kinds of snake oil sales push a button or two for me. The sheer fact that its an mlm product usually screams fraud, and preying on fear to me.
That is very true. That was the part of the reason given for the company telling distributors they could no longer talk about their own experiences with the products because that was seen to be misleading. Just because the product worked one way for someone doesn’t mean it will work that way for someone else. And anything that could be implying that it did, could be seen as misleading.
The same is now true for any financial claims. Years ago it was quite expected that at any meeting the upline would bring a copy of their check to show everyone. This was seen as implying anyone who was in the company could make that amount of money. The reality was that only about 1% of the people in the company made big money. So odds were that the average person would not ever earn that kind of money so it was very misleading, and companies were told their distributors had to stop doing that as well.
I barely passed my HS and College biology classes. There was no way I was going to try to explain at a cellular level what our products were designed to do. So I relied mostly on my own experiences, and talking about other’s experiences with using the products. Then when I was told I could no longer do that, or talk about the amount of money I made selling these products, I really thought that would be the end for me. All I could do was hand someone a product and tell them if after a month they liked the results and wanted more, then they could contact me and I would show them how to order product directly from the company. Luckily enough people called and wanted more product, so I am pretty much retired and live off the residual income.
Many companies can’t survive that way because they really didn’t have a good product to start with. Many, many, MLM’s start first with the marketing plan. A complicated way to pay people for selling something. Then once they figure that out, then they look around for a product to sell. Most of the time the product is secondary, just a means to make a pyramid scheme legal.
I do appreciate the use of your word “usually” when talking about fraud and MLM. I would go as far as to say most of the time there is some type of fraud involved. But I think there can be exceptions, if the company really has a unique product that people really derive benefits from, then MLM can be an ethical way to distribute it.
Some of mine were basically software. They worked, but there was no way in hell for the patent examiner to be able to evaluate that they did, especially given their work load.
A device for dispersing a fire extinguishing product, a web browser for push technology, and something I’m prohibited by confidentiality from specifying.
For the right price Liberal I won’t tell people that you patented an “Improbability Drive” :smack: Doh! [sup] sorry lib[/sup]
Yeah, well ya can’t unring the bell, you know. Bastard. […arms akimbo…]
Has the last one issued yet? Or are they trying to hide something good in the mass of crappy patents?
And, of course, your reply to this is to ask, “So you’re admitting this is patent medicine?”
A few points:
(1) You can say that your idea is patented. You might be lying.
(2) The FDA, not the PTO has jurisdiction over the issue of whether medications or supplements work. So, really, the fact of having a patent doesn’t prove anything. Ask them what the FDA says.
(3) The PTO will require that you show that the invention is enabled, such that someone of ordinary skill in the art would be able to read the patent and then make and use the invention.
(4) Many issued patents are challenged as being invalid for lack of novelty, utility, for being obvious, for lack of enablement, and other issues. Just because you happen to hold a patent certificate in your hand doesn’t mean it’s a good one.
The invention must be novel. Originality is not relevant to patents.
I have serious doubts that this is true, but I’ll have to look into it.
No, this isn’t correct. If you haven’t figured out how to make your invention work, but then someone else later does that second person is the one who enabled the invention and has the right to the patent.