slarty,
sorry if I misinterpreted your posts.
You are correct in the sense that if no profit was made on an infringing product, then there is little to recover.
However, there are still 'losses' to the patent holder - someone didn't buy their product, they bought the infringing one - and that you can hold someone liable for.
The risk of doing what you suggest is that once a potential infringer has been informed of their infringment, and they continue to manufacture and market, they are now liable for punitive damages - which are three times whatever monetary loss is associated with the product.
Secondly - its not up to the potential infringer to 'determine that the claims are too broad' - that happens in court and any good litigator will tell you that no matter how much the law may be on your side, going to court is a major crapshoot. You can be absolutely right, carry the weight of world opinion with you, and still lose because someone doesn't understand or had a bad 'hair' day.
(BTW - the inside poop on the wgp lawsuits is not that wgp lost, but that they ran out of funding to pursue their case after the court found that their attorneys had filed the case in the wrong venue; the official result of that case was 'without prejudice to either party' - meaning that the court felt there was enough merit to the case to proceed, but that they needed to have it heard in the correct court. No one WON that case and no one LOST either, and there most certainly was no finding on the merits of the case as to whether someone did or did not infringe on the trade dress of the autococker...)
Back to patents. By definition, if someone has infringed, you HAVE lost something and there ARE damages.
Its not easy to 'stand up and play hardnosed business' when everything you have is potentially at risk.
The path I'd take would be to first hire a patent attorney to review the claims and give me their advice. Only if there were a clear case of no infringement (which is rare, rare, rare) would I fight against it. If it was 'iffy', I'd next inquire as to licensing.
PTP's claims are very solid. They are as broad as the PTO allowed them to be, and my goal in writing them was to make them as broad as possible. The objective of the claims is to anticipate any other methods someone might use to get around having to license and then cover them in the claims, as well as anticipating possible future expansion/development of the concept.
This is why GOOD patents are written from 'broad claims to narrow claims' (such as every possible way to make a trigger, then all the way down to the specific one); its why you try and use words and phrases that are not specific - such as 'means for actuating' instead of 'pneumatic ram' or 'electrical power supply' instead of 'battery'.
I believe that PTP's patent is a legitimate one, without prior art, and with claims that are not 'too broad'; I know this because PTP has been dealing with 'fallacious' patents for years now (for example, the guy who got the powerfeed patent after it had been on the market for ten years) and the company is committed to only applying for patents that meet the stated requirements for a patent; they don't spend money on IP 'trying to get away with something'. They would much rather compete in a world in which only 'deserved' patents are applied for and granted - if only to help avoid the expense and time that is required when you start doing this stuff.
Thousands of dollars and five+ years of time spent on a worthless piece of paper - that's not what PTP is about.
Folks can argue with me about 'what they've seen' or 'what so and so made in the basement' being prior art - but if they read the claims and then compared what they have supposedly seen to what was granted with the patent - AND they were honest with themselves, the most they could say is that someone had something like it (and that wouldn't even be true, but an understandable position given how easy it is to use broad definitions coupled with lack of engineering knowledge) - but they would not be able to call whatever they saw prior art.
Function is different from the means of achieving that function; if they weren't different, someone who got a patent for a paintball gun would have literally every design out there covered by it because they all 'launch a projectile'.
Hope this helps clarify things.
sorry if I misinterpreted your posts.
You are correct in the sense that if no profit was made on an infringing product, then there is little to recover.
However, there are still 'losses' to the patent holder - someone didn't buy their product, they bought the infringing one - and that you can hold someone liable for.
The risk of doing what you suggest is that once a potential infringer has been informed of their infringment, and they continue to manufacture and market, they are now liable for punitive damages - which are three times whatever monetary loss is associated with the product.
Secondly - its not up to the potential infringer to 'determine that the claims are too broad' - that happens in court and any good litigator will tell you that no matter how much the law may be on your side, going to court is a major crapshoot. You can be absolutely right, carry the weight of world opinion with you, and still lose because someone doesn't understand or had a bad 'hair' day.
(BTW - the inside poop on the wgp lawsuits is not that wgp lost, but that they ran out of funding to pursue their case after the court found that their attorneys had filed the case in the wrong venue; the official result of that case was 'without prejudice to either party' - meaning that the court felt there was enough merit to the case to proceed, but that they needed to have it heard in the correct court. No one WON that case and no one LOST either, and there most certainly was no finding on the merits of the case as to whether someone did or did not infringe on the trade dress of the autococker...)
Back to patents. By definition, if someone has infringed, you HAVE lost something and there ARE damages.
Its not easy to 'stand up and play hardnosed business' when everything you have is potentially at risk.
The path I'd take would be to first hire a patent attorney to review the claims and give me their advice. Only if there were a clear case of no infringement (which is rare, rare, rare) would I fight against it. If it was 'iffy', I'd next inquire as to licensing.
PTP's claims are very solid. They are as broad as the PTO allowed them to be, and my goal in writing them was to make them as broad as possible. The objective of the claims is to anticipate any other methods someone might use to get around having to license and then cover them in the claims, as well as anticipating possible future expansion/development of the concept.
This is why GOOD patents are written from 'broad claims to narrow claims' (such as every possible way to make a trigger, then all the way down to the specific one); its why you try and use words and phrases that are not specific - such as 'means for actuating' instead of 'pneumatic ram' or 'electrical power supply' instead of 'battery'.
I believe that PTP's patent is a legitimate one, without prior art, and with claims that are not 'too broad'; I know this because PTP has been dealing with 'fallacious' patents for years now (for example, the guy who got the powerfeed patent after it had been on the market for ten years) and the company is committed to only applying for patents that meet the stated requirements for a patent; they don't spend money on IP 'trying to get away with something'. They would much rather compete in a world in which only 'deserved' patents are applied for and granted - if only to help avoid the expense and time that is required when you start doing this stuff.
Thousands of dollars and five+ years of time spent on a worthless piece of paper - that's not what PTP is about.
Folks can argue with me about 'what they've seen' or 'what so and so made in the basement' being prior art - but if they read the claims and then compared what they have supposedly seen to what was granted with the patent - AND they were honest with themselves, the most they could say is that someone had something like it (and that wouldn't even be true, but an understandable position given how easy it is to use broad definitions coupled with lack of engineering knowledge) - but they would not be able to call whatever they saw prior art.
Function is different from the means of achieving that function; if they weren't different, someone who got a patent for a paintball gun would have literally every design out there covered by it because they all 'launch a projectile'.
Hope this helps clarify things.
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