Law as a career Engineering as a career

Patent seeking can be done by non-lawyers and I'm sure that many inventors got their own patents without spending $20,000 to 40,000. The problem is that this can also be farmed out to India, where some Indian will get maybe $100 for the work, and some patent firm's general partner will hand over a bill to you for say half of the first figures above. The difference will be what goes into the net profit for the boodle fund that pays the paycheck of the general partners of the patent firm. There are books on this in large public libraries.

As an aside, I think it was a very recent (front page) article in the WSJ that said that patent scaming is really creating problems for a lot of the big corporations (not that I feel too sad when Microsoft gets a piece of its rear end bitten off); there are a lot of small--even one person--outifits that work with special law firms (the ones the specialize in this business) and the one guy comes up with a patent on some little dinky thing and then, as in the case of Eolas (or however it is spelled), got something like a $500 million settlement with Microsoft. I don't know what the cut is for the law firm, but putting hundreds of millions of dollars into some guy's pocket for a technicality and the other hundreds of millions into the lawyers pockets seems, for the issue at hand, a little unfair. And, the WSJ article talked about some big company that just made $100 mill, net, and got slapped with litigation that aims to take all of that net away, and for doing very little work, also seems unfair. The old case of the guy who invented the delayed interval windsheild wiper, and took 20 years to get his due cut that all the car manufacturers tried to cheat is, to me, a different matter. So, it boils down to exactly what the patent-able-ed issue is all about. IBM sued and settled with Microsoft for poo that Microsoft did against OS-2 back in the early '90s, and that was about $750 million that should have been settled long ago. Who benefitted? The lawyers. Not the customers and citizens. "Patent flooding" has been going on for quite some time and represents a legal (but maybe unethical) method to guarantee a monopoly for the business that manages to patent all possible variations on some invention. The counter-attack is to hire lawyers to help engineers, or have legal-engineering backgrounds, to invent around these patents. The toner-ink cartridge industry is, right now, very hotly "inventing around" and "patent flooding" the whole toner-ink technology since it is very lucrative. Go into any Staples store and notice that Staples is selling at a good 10-12% off, HP-compatible toner cartridges (built very differently from HP cartridges) and I'm sure that HP is very upset about this. I buy the compatible cartridges all the time because they work and they are cheaper.

Another industy is water faucet inserts. For quite some time, all these fancy-schmantzy leakproof-lifetime fawcets (they are not leakproof not lifetime, either, I have several in my house, now, and impossible to fix without replacing the whole buttembly) with fantasticly detailed differences in minute detail (view at your local hardware store) and long lists of patent numbers. In the old days, it was a two cent rubber gasket and-or a 25-50 cent brbutt "seat" that you changed every, say, 7 years, to get your fawcett to stop leaking if it wore out. Now, the inserts are $10-15 and none of the ones at all the many hardware stores had the one I wanted. I consider it a disservice to the public that our industry will spend so much money on such activities clearly useless and impractical for the public. There are several other technologies in our modern Western society that have the same problem but I will stop adding my relevant tangents at this point.