What To Do If You Think Your Patent Has Been Infringed�|�ExpertsArticles.com�

What To Do If You Think Your Patent Has Been Infringed

By: Sheryl Sanchez

Patents provide an inventor the authority to stop others from using his or her invention for their own personal profit through unlawful means. They allow the inventor to sue a person or company for trying to make such illegal use of the product or the process. However, you should keep certain essential aspects in mind when going for a legal action to deal with such an infringement.

Firstly, you should ensure that there has been a complete and perceptible infringement of your product protected by patent. This is to say that your product should have been copied in all its features including the apparently minor ones. In some rare cases even if not all these features have been copied by the violating party, the patent can still be treated as having been infringed. However, you will have to prove that the major aspects of the infringing product are same as the patented product in all elements and produce the same outcome as the patented product.

Secondly, you ought to have some kind of legal interest in the patent in order to bring prosecution against the offender. For filing such a suit, you need to be the patent owner or at least a partial or exclusive licensee of the patented product. Further, in order to make sure that your suit will get a court hearing, you need to file the suit within the allotted time under the limitation statute of your country.

You can take legal action against the maker as well as the user of the product that you consider to be an imitation of your product, but you can do so only within the time stipulated for validity of a patent according to the law. Once the span of patent has expired, no legal action can be taken against any infringement.

Last but not the least, though patents are based upon the strict liability principle, you must keep in mind that the use of a patent for conducting research is allowed and it is not considered as tantamount to infringement.



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categories: IP lawyer,trademarks,patents,ideas protection,copyright,business idea protection,protecting business ideas,business value,Intellectual property

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