Patents offer legal recognition to the right of an inventor to prevent unscrupulous individuals from making use of his or her invention for their own advantage. They give the inventor the option to sue a person or a firm for deliberate infringement of his invention or its manufacturing process. However, there are a few aspects that need to be considered before taking legal action against an infringement.

Firstly, you are needed to ensure that your patented product has been literally infringed. In other words, the infringing product should have imitated all features of your original product. It is only in exceptional cases that an infringement that is not strictly literal is treated as a valid infringement of a patent. However, this needs evidence to the effect that there are substantial similarities and that the end result that the imitated product creates is notably similar to the genuine product.

Secondly, you need to have some type of legal interest in the patent in order to file a suit against the offender. You can either be the owner of the patented product or a licensee – exclusive or partial – of the product to be able to file a suit for infringement. You also need to take into account the law of limitation of the state and take legal action within the time allotted for such cases, as otherwise the claim would be considered as expired.

You can take action against the manufacturer as well as the user of the product that you see as infringing your product, but you can do so only within the time stipulated for validity of a patent according to the law. No unauthorized use of the product can be termed as a deliberate infringement after the expiry of the patent.

Regardless of the strict liability principle that is applicable to patents, the use of a patented product for research work does not amount to an infringement under the patent laws for most countries.

Discover more about trademarks and learn how does an patents protection increase the net worth of your business very fast. Don’t reprint this exact article. Instead, reprint a free unique content version of this same article.

Related Content

Subscribe to the post comments feeds or Leave a trackback