How To Deal With Patent Infringement
Patents help an inventor to prevent unlawful use of his or her invention by other parties for their own economic advantage in an illegal and unauthorized manner. They give the inventor the right to sue a person or a company for deliberate infringement of his patented product or its manufacturing process. However, there are a few aspects that need to be considered before taking legal action against an infringement.
First, you have to ensure that the alleged infringement is an instance of a literal infringement of your patented product. In other words, the infringing product should have copied all aspects of your product. In certain cases even if not all these aspects have been copied by the violating party, the patent can still be considered to have been infringed. However, you will have to provide valid proof that the essential features of the imitation are similar to the patented product in all respects and produce the same result as the patented product.
Secondly, you cannot be a third party and take legal action against the infringer, which implies that you should have some legitimate interest in the patent. You can either be the sole owner of the patented product or a licensee – exclusive or partial – of the product in order to be eligible for filing a suit for violation. You also have to take into account the law of limitation of the jurisdiction and file a suit within the time allotted for such cases, as otherwise the claim would be considered as expired.
Though, you have an option of prosecuting the manufacturer or even the user of the counterfeit product, you can take any such legal action only when the patent is yet to expire. No unauthorized use of the product can be considered a deliberate infringement after the lapse of the patent.
Notwithstanding the strict liability principle that patents are governed by, the use of a patented product for research work does not amount to an infringement under the current laws in most nations.
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