[Moderating]
Since this is asking for professional advice, IMHO is a better fit. Moving.
Do you need patents for each country it is sold in?
If you define “need” as “required”, no.
The longer answer is that one can either patent in countries that are the primary market and restrain others from selling infringing versions or file in countries that are the primary manufacturers and restrain them from manufacturing infringing versions.
Since the US is a major market for almost all products, you usually don’t need foreign patents, since both manufacturers and sellers aren’t going to risk giving up rights in the US. If, in fact, there is a major foreign center of manufacturing an sales, you may need to consider foreign patents.
However, foreign patents can cost a lot, including the necessity to employ foreign law firms to prosecute the application. In addition, each country you patent in is an additional cost for maintenance fees.
Can individuals or companies use patents to keep something off the market? Lets suppose he has a device that works very well and is selling good. But he also has another better device that he plans to use for his ace in the hole if a competitor comes along and starts beating him.
That’s one of the only things a patent is useful for. Patenting is publication of a method or apparatus that is inventive (novel and non-obvious). Once a patent is published, the owner of the patent has the right to prevent use of the patent by others, or to require payment for use of the patent.
If you have an “ace in the hole”, that’s a trade secret. You can’t prevent others from using the IP contained in a trade secret as long as they came by that IP legitimately (on their own or from published information).
Under current patent law, if you are practicing a trade secret and someone patents that trade secret (without stealing it from you), they can now prevent you from practicing that trade secret. So your ace in the hole becomes a joker.
Suppose it was not a trade secret at all but the company with the patent which is public information chose not to use simply because they did not need to use it yet. For example: I have a light bulb that is the bestselling light bulb. I am making good profit on it. But I have a better patent on a superior product that I am just holding back on until the competition forces me to use it. It would not be well known to the public even though those searching patents would easily find it. I did read about a couple of cases where the petitioner showed a need for the product as in protecting public health and they got favorable judgements.
Guess who owns the patent office? Right. The government has the right to force the use of a patent even if the owner wants to simply prevent its use.
However, they have to have a need and that need can’t be commercial. It has to be a public need. And the patent owner has a right to be paid for the use of the patent (sort of like the process of public domain appropriation for land).
Often, this is part of a broader process to hide the patent from any form of public access by applying a secrecy order. Basically, if the government decides the invention is too sensitive to become publicly available under any open patent terms, they can classify the application and keep it from being issued.
Depends on the jurisdiction. Canada has a provision in the law about abuse of patent rights, which can be used in just such a case.
For example, as stipulated in section 65 of the Patent Act, commencing three years after the grant of a patent, a party may apply to the Commissioner of Patents alleging abuse of the patent through unduly restrictive licensing conditions. If the Commissioner of Patents is satisfied that there has been abusive conduct, there are a number of actions he/she may take, including ordering that the patent be revoked or licensed to the applicant on such terms as the Commissioner of Patents may think expedient.
The intent of patent law is to promote the development of the useful arts. It’s a bargain between the inventors and society, in the form of the government. Deliberately not allowing the use of a patented product is a violation of that agreement, and can be opposed.
Another factor is, unless it’s classified as discussed above, granted patents are public documents. They also have a fixed lifetime. So even if you could suppress it in the marketplace, eventually the patent will lapse, and you will lose this leverage. So the timing of when to bring your new product to market will be critical. If you leave it too late, you might have a very short period in which you own the market, before your competitors can start selling the same item.
Here is another issue probably far more common than suppression. An inventor simply lacks funds or capabilities to bring something to market. Are these usually discovered by other patent seekers who eventually buy them out or do they just expire?
Slightly off topic but I think a lot of the same people who posted here would have input on this question. I notice a common phrase used on kick starter. ( “I will keep you advised on the progress of our campaign”) Is this really just another way of saying you will get first crack when I start looking for investors? If so that would make me feel better about something like Kickstarter, it is hard to accept just getting something for nothing.
An anecdote from earlier in my career:
In the 1990s, the U.S. had its first big push to eliminate aerosol-spray products that used CFCs as their propellants, as well as spray products which contained volatile alcohols (which were believed to be a contributor to air pollution).
At the time, I was working at a personal-care products company, which marketed aerosol hairsprays, and aerosol underarm anti-perspirants. Non-aerosol “pump” spray dispensers were a known, established technology at the time, but did not deliver the fine spray that an aerosol did; combined with having to switch to non-alcohol formulations, the hair sprays and antiperspirants which used non-aerosol sprays delivered inferior performance: they sprayed unevenly, and took too long to dry.
Our R&D group was approached by several patent-holders – all of them independent inventors – who had developed, and patented, non-aerosol spray devices which they claimed would deliver product performance comparable to aerosol sprays. All of those inventors were small businesspersons, who lacked the financial resources to actually bring their devices to market, and so, they were hoping to sell the rights to a company like ours.
Unfortunately for them, none of their patented devices actually worked as hoped: their performance was not, in fact, substantially better than a non-aerosol spray, and most of them were complex, fiddly mechanisms, which would have been expensive to produce (more expensive than the rest of the package and product contents, in fact). Ultimately, I imagine that none of those patents led to a product which was actually ever marketed by anyone, and the patents lapsed without ever being actualized. In other words, just because you were able to get a patent on something doesn’t mean that it’s actually any good, or worth trying to develop into a consumer product.
Yes, the deep dark secret of the patent world is that the vast majority of patents never actually make a profit for anyone. Either they don’t work quite as well as hoped, or the customers don’t perceive enough extra value to switch to the new product, or their solution immediately gets superseded by an even better one.
That was a very good example. I came up with one 40 years ago that involved propellants. I built myself a greenhouse window opener using R 134 freon gas. I found out later that they were already on the market but used cyl where mine used a diaphragm and shorter stroke. The advantage of the diaphragm is that they can be built leak proof. I don’t know if anyone has come up with it since or not.
I don’t think you can find a “usual” for this. There’s too many ways it could go. Sure, they could sell it, or license it. Or it could just get stolen, as discussed above. Or no one ever bothers to implement it, and the patent eventually lapses. Or someone else with more resources comes up with a better version, and markets that one instead. I’m sure I’ve missed a few possibilities, as well.
As a counterpoint, from that same time in my life:
In the late 1980s, Procter & Gamble introduced Pert Plus, which was the first truly effective shampoo-plus-conditioner in one bottle.
Earlier attempts at such a product had failed, largely because shampoo (which is a detergent/surfactant) and conditioner (which is essentially an oil) don’t want to play well together, and tended to separate in the bottle. P&G had patented a manufacturing process for getting the two elements of the product into a stable emulsion, and Pert Plus wound up suddenly gaining a massive market share.
Our R&D team understood P&G’s patent, but the patent obviously precluded us from being able to produce a competitive product in the same way. We undertook a massive project, with something like half of R&D involved, to come up with a way to produce a good two-in-one product.
It took several years, dozens of dead-ends, and millions of dollars, but we eventually did succeed (as did several of our other competitors) – but in the meantime, P&G enjoyed record sales in the segment due to that patent (which, I believe, they had developed internally).
Yes. I was going to add to my post, the profits from the ones that really hit, pretty much support the whole patent industry. Everyone still wants patents, because while it’s rare, it is still possible to make huge amounts of money off them.
ETA: I also just noticed, “but we eventually did succeed (as did several of our other competitors)”
That’s another reason many patents don’t make money. All the big players in an industry are pretty much all aware of what The Big Problem is in their industry, and are all trying to solve it. Some come up with the same ideas at almost the same time, and then only one gets the patent, or they come up with different solutions, and one turns out to have a major competitive advantage, so the other solutions never succeed.
I actually have a lawyer now but I thought I would continue the discussion here anyway incase others have similar issues they may be dealing with now or in the future.
My current I have now is, once the patent application has been filed and it is in the patent pending stage. Will the patent office accept or reject? Or is there some back and forth possibly involved about issues that may come up?
I actually have a lot of questions but will do them one at a time.
If the application is for a utility patent, it will almost certainly be rejected through an Office Action. Your lawyer should then make a recommendation on how to overcome the examiner’s objections in the OA. Generally, this recommendation can range from arguing the examiner is mistaken to modifying claims, to dropping claims.
I say almost certain because that is my experience across a lot of applications over about 20 years. Every patent application gets at least one OA, and the final patent claims that are granted can look very different from what was submitted.
Yes, there’s a lot of back-and-forth, and even if you hit a wall with an examiner who fundamentally disagrees with the applicant on whether or not a patent should issue, that can be appealed to the next level above the examiner, and ultimately to the courts if you feel strongly enough about it, and can afford it.
Ultimately, the purpose of examination is to determine the true scope of the claims that the applicant is legally entitled to. If you do have a new, useful and patentable idea, you have a right to the patent that covers that idea. The caveat is, the scope of what you really invented may not be what you conceive of as “your invention” right now.
So don’t despair at a negative report, take a look at what the examiner finds, and use that to guide your amendments and arguments, to determine what you’re really entitled to.