Use Specialist IP Lawyers to Prevent Patent Infringement


If you want to stop someone from infringing on your patent and stealing your business, the best thing to do is contact a specialist IP lawyer to make sure your patent is well drafted to protect against this.

If you have invented or developed a new product, service or concept, then protecting it adequately is a vital step. You also cannot over-estimate the value of contacting a professionally qualified IP Lawyer for intellectual property advice - the money you spend now will be repaid several-fold.

Adequate protection will ensure that you can exploit the financial opened up by your development, and prevent others piggybacking on your success. If you've developed some potentially great ideas, patenting might be the best way that you can protect them - a patent that has been properly registered will protect you from many forms of infringement.

One way in which a patent can be infringed is by deliberate copying, or by developing something that is an extremely close approximation of the patented product. If the latter, it could be that the copying company has been advised that the original patent is not sufficiently strong to mount a strong defence in court, in other words that it was not well drafted.

If several features of the product have been copy, the argument could be made that the patent has been infringed - leaving the matter to be sorted out through a discussion concerning the validity of the patent claims. You might find that there has been an attempt to hide the evidence of the infringement, despite it having been closely copied; this could happen if some of the material relevant to the patent becomes known during business negotiations. In particular, if a patented product or process has obvious commercial benefits, then it will be in the commercial interest of less than scrupulous business people to work around the patent and develop something similar that achieves the same end. This area in particular gives rise to the most litigation, as expert IP Lawyers argue about whether there is an infringement or not.

Finally, there is a situation that sometimes arises, of accidental infringement. The old adage of "there's no such thing as an original idea" may come into play here, as many people with a newly patented product will naturally start looking out in their market sector, to see whether there is any rival product that could be claimed to be infringing on their patented product, service or method. If the patented method is solving a common problem - and tapping a lucrative market sector - then it is all the more likely that more than one company is working on the same problem at the same time; and that their solutions could well employ the same chemistry or physics in their solutions. Sometimes even though the end result might look similar, it could be that it was achieved in a totally different way.