How does a patent translate to money for the inventor, and how is it normally enforced? Let’s say that you invent the McCormick Reaper. Ok, so you get the basic design down. What happens when someone makes an iterative improvement? What then? Do you simply get a cut of every copy of the mechanised reaper bought and sold that is your version?
Do patents apply only for commercial usage?
In: Technology
Person 1 patents a device that does A, B, and C.
Person 2 patents a device that does does C, with D and E improvements, and lists Person 1’s patent in the application.
Person 2 needs to pay Person 1 to fully utilize his patent, that is make and sell his devices.
Person 1 needs to pay Person 2 if he wants to use those improvements D and E on the devices he sells.
How is it enforced? Person 1 catches Person 2 for selling his devices containing technology C, and sues him. Reverse, Person 2 can sue Person 1 if he caught him using D and E in his. In this case, if D and E were valuable enough, they’d probably just cross-license, they both sell, nobody pays each other.
Now this is theory. In actual court it can get really, really messy.
Person 1 can actually have no desire to make his device. He just had an idea and patented it. His device isn’t all that useful with A, B, C, but he has a patent. Person 2 independently invents a D, E device and patents it, but Person 1’s patent is written so broadly it could be stretched to cover a part of Person 2’s device, sort of an assumed C.
So Person 1 sits around and does nothing, and sues anyone who comes close to using A, B, or C in their devices. Often the other people will just pay him off because it’s cheaper than the millions it costs to litigate a patent dispute. This is called a patent troll.
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