Patent Attorney and Founder
Hi everyone, I’m JD Houvener, your host of the Bold Today’s show for you, the inventor, entrepreneur or business owner, get your daily inspiration so you go make the world a better place.
Hey, we’re in about the middle of our five-part series, ten part series on patent litigation and it’s Friday so you made it, you’re looking forward to a good weekend ahead. What I want to leave you with is the last type of infringement. Okay, we’ve talked about direct infringement, inducement induced infringement, and today which I want, contributory infringement, is the third type of challenge that a plaintiff can make to a defendant saying, you know what, even though you didn’t literally infringe and you may not have convinced someone else like as a downstream retailer or salesperson to infringe, what you’ve done is produced a product that in and of itself doesn’t infringe but it can only be used for an infringing purpose.
Okay, so back to our airplane analogy right, if you’re developing an airplane engine and you know that the certain type of air inlet technology is protected under patent law and you make everything but that final piece of skin material that would form the nose cavity on the engine and you ship that out of, out of state, excuse me, out of the country, and in that scowl write that in the cell of the engine finally gets put on out of the country where there are no patent rights, well what you’ve developed is the heart of the patent and over the years patent law has developed into rewarding plaintiffs the ability to seek meritoriously the their claim for infringement even if there isn’t direct infringement happening by that one manufacturer. They’re trying to create a loophole and so the system and the judges and a jury have seen past this and so through contributory infringement plaintiff will be a victor.
So I hope this has been a fun week for you to learn a lot about litigation. Hopefully none of you end up in trial ever. The beauty of having this knowledge is that you can enforce your rights with gusto and so if you do have someone that is infringing your patent you better help your attorney gather all the information so that they can write a cease and desist letter and try to get a very good settlement in your favor outside of trial.
And it’s exciting to hear about all the recent big cases going up before the Federal Circuit and Supreme Court but they’re all really ammunition that we as attorneys can use in your favor to help you win that battle whether you’re on the plaintiff side or on the defense side, the more information the better.
So if you have any more questions, I know it’s been a lot, you know, it’s a pretty quick amount of time we have much more on our website. I encourage you to visit BoldIP.com and if you want to book a free 30 minute consultation you can do that right from the website. Feel free to also give us a call.