[TowerTalk] Patentability (OT)

[Tom Rauch]

> As someone else who has been through the patent submission process, I
> agree with most of what Norm says -- it's not as easy to get a patent as
> you might think. I especially agree that an examination of prior art is an
> important part of the process. Unfortunately, the examiner may not always
> be as familiar with the prior art as we would hope. The applicant is
> required to divulge all known prior art, but I sometimes wonder how well
> this is enforced.

It isn't enforced.
 
> BTW, the process is *very* expensive. It costs about $20,000 for each U.S.
> patent (mostly attorney's fees), and as much as $200,000 more to broadly
> protect the invention internationally (mostly translation fees and more
> attorney's fees.)

You're getting ripped off, unless the patent is in some other class 
than the area we are discussing. The typical cost is much less 
than $5k for nuisance-type patent where you don't really care if it is 
prior art or not but mainly want to use it to discourage others from 
having a similar product in a low profit low use application.

I think you might be thinking of REAL patents where you actually 
want to insure it is a valid patent, and not just something to "hang 
on your wall".

> Anyhow, I'm sure that Tom's patent is based on prior art, but probably has
> one or more unique features or approaches that qualify it for patent
> protection. It might have been sufficient that the technique is described
> for a yagi (not a dipole, as in the K9AY patent) and uses more than two
> frequencies.

I'm going to patent that three element yagi idea I have. 

14.001 is one frequency....14.0002 is another. Gary's antenna 
covered millions of frequencies, but there was prior art to his as 
well. I have a VHF TV antenna that uses the sleeve decoupling, 
and it covers low band TV, FM, and high band TV. 

This is old common technology folks.


73, Tom W8JI
w8ji@contesting.com

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