Nine months ago I submitted a product to a patent company that supposedly has investers willing to get involved at the development stage.
Last tuesday I received a message from one of their reps to call him. He sounded super excited and was going on and on about how this thing could be so huge. He claimed he had guys ready to jump on it. I figured he was blowing smoke up my ass and didn't call back till today. His manager claimed the rep left the company the next day and apparently took my idea with him. He advised me to sue him if I saw the product show up.
My question is if I were to make public what my product was now could that be helpful in a possible future law suit? The product was marketable as is but really needed a bit more fine tuning.
I can’t answer your question but wouldn’t it be proper to sue the patent company you submitted to if your product showed up? They were tasked with submitting and protecting your patent, weren’t they? If their reps are stealing from the company, that’s on them to prevent that and recover the damages.
This all sounds kind of fishy, like some sort of scam. Things are not adding up; would there not be some sort of contract or documentation of what you submitted and when and under what terms. It seems impossible that the employee could leave the company and steal your idea. Whatever you submitted should have legal protections against anything like this. The behavior of the company in this situation is odd also; wouldn’t they be interested in suing the employee if he makes any attempt to steal your patent? I would be leery if they start asking you for money. For the record I know very little about these businesses, but what you’re describing just sounds kind of odd.
I don’t remember the details from 9 months ago, I honestly barely remembered filling out their form. I was assuming the guy I did talk to would want me to sue his company and that might help him go after the person who may have taken the product idea. I had no e email exchanges with them, I just sent in a form and forgot about it after my excitement for the product kind of wore off. I have continued to work on it in the meantime sporadicaly but not much has really changed.
In my several exchanges with the company today I had conversations with guys they call project managers. It reminded me of a telemarketing firm with commissioned employees. The guys seemed reasonably well spoken but I had the feeling they were a pretty typical patent company.
Forgive me if this sounds like a dumb question, have you tried googling the company in question recently? It might add some insight into the situation, perhaps a long shot though.
I will just put it out there as I am not doing anything with it anyway. I took a mixture of adobe clay, fine silca sand and water to form a brick. I drill a hole in the brick and fill it with treats. As the dog wants more treats he has to dig for them filing his nails in the process. A unit would last about a month or less and if used properly would keep the dogs nails in a constant state of being well maintained.
I have been playing with the hardness of the mixture to appeal to different size dogs and different levels of aggressive digging. It seems to work on nearly every dog I try it with. It does need refining.
At this ppoint I would just enjoy seeing someone perfect what I think is a great concept.
The company in question has no record of my existence, I have a recording of one of their reps calling from their phone. I assume my form was primted out and handed to a project manager salesman to follow up on and they follow up on the ones they have the best shot with. Thsi particular rep seemed to like mine.
Perhaps the only scam was that the agent was calling you in the effort to appear to be busy, and the boss saw through it and saw that it was a fake effort.
Or the other way, the boss was trying to mislead you, eg for the purpose of testing or training his agent. for example ? Or to turn to scamming… perhaps realising the end was near… and the agent saw through it and realized that he was being used for scamming and thats why he left.
Prior to this no money had exchanged hands. I had the feeling after talking to his boss that they were not too interested either way, him telling me to sue the guy I thought was a very uninformed odd statement for an employee to make.
Your idea is interesting. I imagine anyone interested in producing this would be asking about the safety of the materials that might be ingested by a dog. It also sounds like an outside toy since it would leave a mess indoors. Obviously you don’t want to be drilling the bricks in production, but they make regular construction bricks with holes in them (cored bricks) so it shouldn’t be a problem to produce them that way. I think you need a patent to make the concept valuable, it’s all too easy for someone else to produce without that protection.
Good luck with this. Stop worrying about these jerks you contacted, they’re too busy stealing money to use your idea and make money through hard work.
I have several molds I am playing with I just use different size pvc in the mold for the hole.
I checked on the dangers or benefits of dogs ingesting silica sand and adobe clay, gypsum and a few secret ingredients. I didn’t find anything that would indicate a problem.