First, a point of correction. Applications are published 18 months from their priority date. In your example above, if the second application (the non-provisional) is filed at the 12 month mark, then you would only have to wait an extra 6 months for it to publish.

The problem you describe is very real and there have been lots of talks about it at conferences and lots of articles written. There is no good solution and therefore I would not waste too much mental energy or time worrying about it.

If you are unintentional infringing on someone’s patent, there is very little chance they will sue you for money (unless you are making 10+ million). The more likely scenario is you will get a letter to cease and desist your sales. If it looks legit and you agree, then just stop selling and move on to something else.

Thanks Brad that takes a load off of my mind Wheew :)

I will look for the conferences and articles you mentioned just so
i can wrap my mind around this problem with the patent system.

Here is a interesting and thought provoking link about Intellectual
Property, Patents & Copyrights.

http://danny.oz.au/free-software/advocacy/again...

May all your dreams be patentable :)
A.M.C.

That is true, if you don’t know about a patent then you will likely just be asked to stop. No big deal if you have not spent your life savings on getting to that point. However, it’s another very important thing to think about when spending your hard earned money on developing a product.

Great point Mark
I don’t want to be the guy lining up someone else s planets.
Not only would it be a huge waste of time and money it would be disheartening to be at the distribution/sales stage and receive a letter of cease and desist or even a request for restitution due to patent infringement.
I wonder if anyone at Edison Nation has had a similar scenario and perhaps can share there experience.

Stomp strongly and pass through an Iron Wall :)
A.M.C.

The blind spot is what makes researching for patents a real pain, just because you can’t find something like yours doesn’t mean it isn’t out there………

The blind spot issue is a problem that can cause an inventor a great deal of grief. I worried about it for a couple years.

I believe this is just an unavoidable risk you need to take. Even if you’ve done an exhaustive search, you never know what’s out there. With any luck, if an application for a similar product does exist, you’ll find out about it sooner rather than later.

The other thing you got to remember is that it goes beyond is your idea out there……….

It is how the claims are written and this is why sometimes several new items get out into the market and they appear identical……Well it is all about the claims and what aspect of the invention they cover, so just because you see your idea out there doesn’t mean a patent couldn’t be written to cover different aspects; Remember it is how something works is what is covered by a utility patent and how it looks is covered by a design patent.

No matter what the most difficult part of the patent process is getting passed prior art and prior examples of different patents that the examiner will use to say it would have been common knowledge at the time of a previous inventor to implement your idea into theirs if they needed to, which is a hard argument to get passed, especially when it could easily only be hindsight on the examiners part, but try convince them of that =LOL