Having a long history with corporate business protection with IP, a couple of points strike me that I think are getting missed:
- Big business is only protected with a PORTFOLIO of patents - not just a single patent. - The bigger the business, the more manpower that can be applied to working around patents; so the bigger the business (in $), the larger the PORTFOLIO of patents must be. - A large PORTFOLIO becomes a high scary wall for any serious company to attempt to overcome. If Industrial Heat wants to protect their interests, they need to file ~50 applications this year to begin a portfolio to protect their investment. (And basically lock down until that is done.) I believe that Rossi's material is un-protect-able at this point due to the lack of validity of his current application (making it now part of prior art), and due to all of the published prior art on LENR materials in the intervening years. Any new (improved) patent written on the material would have a priority date of the new application date - with everything up until then being prior art. Another problem with any new material patent would be that Rossi has already sold units more than 1 year ago (I think) and you only have 1 year in the US to file an application after the first offer for sale. Once the secret comes out, there will be more understanding of how LENR works, and many work-arounds will emerge to have LENR without violating any material patent that could be written *with today's understanding of LENR*. The real opportunity is writing patents on the multitude of apparatus that will use LENR, that will provide a means of throttling the reaction, that will make it more durable, or will make it safer. It is really, really hard to build a company on a trade secret. - Bob Higgins On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 8:37 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote: > Terry Blanton <hohlr...@gmail.com> wrote: > > WD40 never filed a patent so that no one would know their secret >> ingredients. >> > > So, it is a trade secret. That works for a product with a limited market. > If WD40 were worth hundreds of billions, other companies would do a > chemical analysis of it, and then reverse engineer it. Cold fusion has > gigantic market potential, so it will be reverse engineered no matter how > difficult that may be. A trade secret would not work for it. > > - Jed >
