Why are their so few synergy/unity builds??

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#41
bwaslo said:
But once something has been offered for sale commercially, the patent must have been applied for within one year, or the concept become public domain. You can't be granted a patent for something you or someone else has been selling longer than a year previous to your applying.

Or so the law was at that time. I was patenting something that was under such a deadline about the same period (the company I was working for was selling a product and then decided they should maybe patent some parts of it that I was involved with) ... since then, the law has changed so that there is something called a "provisional patent" that has to be filed before even offering it for sale).
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That would be true for something that was very obvious like the difference between a speaker with one horn or two horns attached to a bifurcated joint. However, the location of a bandpass injection point and its phase relative to the tweeter, unless explicitly described - will probably not be known by the patent examiner as prior art.
 
#42
Or it could be that Tom found out about a lot of other advantages he hadn't thought of at first -- things that the Unity concept does due to an unexpected *synergy* with many of the should-be's of good quality audio. Single-point behavior, linearizeable phase, driver loading, smooth directivity handoff, distortion reduction.

And he wanted to make sure he got credit for how neat it all works out. I don't think Tom's a litigious kind of guy, but he does justifiyably take a lot of pride in his ideas.
 
#43
If you can retrieve a prior art article and prove that an invention claimed existed one year before the patent was applied for (that article being in public view), then the patent will not be enforceable legally. That's in "Patents 101" courses. You can't disclose an invention publicly more than one year before patent is applied for. Otherwise the patent should have never been issued. The problem is that the USPTO doesn't do much in the way of surveillance of prior art, except for stuff that's printed or online. It leaves that part up to the courts to sort out.

The type of abusive practice doing that deliberately is sometimes called "patent trolling". We've had a few of those type of folks in a particular court in east Texas (with an on-the-take judge) doing that sort of thing. It's not cool. There are laws being drafted to stop that sort of thing.

Chris
 
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