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Edited on Wed Sep-02-09 12:35 PM by NNadir
is that the potential licensee tries to examine everything in his, her, or their experience (or potential experience) that they can do to accomplish the same task without paying you any royalties.
That's good business.
Essentially, besides filing infringement suits, the best thing a patent attorney can do for you - a good one - is to assure that your claims are broad enough that there will be infringement suits, and also, paradoxically, that your patent will be rejected at least once. If it's not rejected, you haven't claimed enough.
If you read a composition of matter patent from a major corporation, for instance, you will see that they almost try to claim every known and unknown compound of a particular type. I've seen patents that seem to wish to claim the entire periodic table and all known combinations thereof.
Sometimes this leads to hellacious reckonings.
I've been at very funny meetings where two companies are giving gracious scientific talks, back to back, while each company is suing the hell out of the other over stuff that their both talking about at the meeting, each claiming as their own. This is relatively common in the pharmaceutical industry.
The thing I wished to claim is more or less peripheral to the broader scope, and I may be able to claim that system as a reaction medium rather than a separation medium.
I've actually been to the facility of the assignee in this case, on an entirely unrelated matter. My impression of them is that some of those guys working there are full of shit, but I can't say I know them all. Interestingly they had to locate their facility - the one I went to - remotely because of the possibility that they would blow their plant up, I kid you not. They were in the energetic materials field. If you go around the world enough, you can see lots of those kinds of plants, like the ammonium perchlorate plant that blew up in Henderson, Nevada. (The Henderson plant was not the assignee I was talking about by the way, although the assignee did make explosives and propellants.)
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