United States or Portugal ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"No inventor," reported the United States Commissioner of Patents in 1858, "probably has ever been so harassed, so trampled upon, so plundered by that sordid and licentious class of infringers known in the parlance of the world, with no exaggeration of phrase as 'pirates. The spoliation of their incessant guerilla upon his defenseless rights have unquestionably amounted to millions." Doc.
Some few succeed, and then they have lawsuits with the infringers of their patents; some sell out their inventions for a trifle to companies that have capital, and that grow rich upon them; the great number can never bring their ideas to the public notice at all. You can judge for yourself what your chances would be. You have asked me why you should not go to America.
Not only must he be prepared to fight in the Patent Office and pursue a regular course of patent litigation against those who may honestly deem themselves to be protected by other inventions or patents of similar character, and also proceed against more palpable infringers who are openly, defiantly, and illegitimately engaged in competitive business operations, but he must, as well, endeavor to protect himself against the assaults of impudent fraud by educating the public mind to a point of intelligent apprehension of the true status of his invention and the conflicting claims involved.
"They continue to clean great quantities of cotton with Lyon's Gin and sell it advantageously while the Patent ginned cotton is run down as good for nothing," writes Miller to Whitney in September, 1797. Miller and Whitney brought suits against the infringers but they could obtain no redress in the courts. Whitney's attitude of mind during these troubles is shown in his letters.
"No inventor probably has ever been so harassed, so trampled upon, so plundered by that sordid and licentious class of infringers known in the parlance of the world, with no exaggeration of phrase, as 'pirates, The spoliations of their incessant guerilla warfare upon his defenceless rights have unquestionably amounted to millions.
There was the man who foreshadowed, in his own career, the new aristocracy about to be evoked by the new machinery. He made spinning devices of his own. He used everybody else's devices. He patented them all. He lied in the patents. He sued infringers of them. He overlooked his defeats in the courts.
The General Assembly could have no power to abrogate a law passed by the three estates of the realm. But probably it was the deep sense of that truth which reined up the national resistance. Sure of a speedy collision between some patron and the infringers of his right, other parties stood back for the present, to watch the form which such a collision might assume.
Fortunate indeed were Watt and Boulton in their partnership, for they became friends first and partners afterward. They were not less fortunate in each having a talented son, who also became friends and partners like their fathers before them. The decision was that the infringers of their patents were to be proceeded against. They had to appeal to the law to protect their rights.
But after Bell had explained his invention in public lectures before more than twenty thousand people, after it had been on exhibition for months at the Philadelphia Centennial, after several hundred articles on it had appeared in newspapers and scientific magazines, and after actual sales of telephones had been made in various parts of the country, there began to appear such a succession of claimants and infringers that the forgetful public came to believe that the telephone, like most inventions, was the product of many minds.
He had, too, the usual fate of inventors, in having to contend with the infringers of his rights, men who owed their all to his ingenuity and perseverance.
Word Of The Day