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Comment by ridgeguy | Hacker News Reader

This is why it's worthwhile filing a provisional patent application ($70).

When your product takes off, you have a potential recourse if you're ripped off.

How are you going to actually execute that and actually win in a Chinese court and get damages back from a Chinese corp?

You can't, but you might be able to get an injunction barring it's import

check out the story about TRX founder regarding this. You can listen to the How I Built This podcast about it, pretty interesting

https://one.npr.org/?sharedMediaId=533980744:534132874

This guy's sliding selfie stick probably isn't patentable. Telescoping selfie sticks are known. Parallel sliding telescoping devices are known; ladders are made that way. So it's an obvious combination of prior art.

But "handheld/miniaturised ladders" are not a thing, so even if the mechanism is the same, the application is different and that's probably enough for a patent.

>But "handheld/miniaturised ladders" are not a thing

No, but there are tons of handled/miniaturised telescopic devices. Antennas in portable walkie talkies and radios are an obvious example, there are umbrellas like that, and tons of other things...

You can own a patent for telescoping ladders and still have to pay royalties to the owners of the telescoping mechanism patent. And if anyone else makes a telescoping ladder with a beverage holder, they can patent that but you can go after them because your patent is more generic. More generic patents take more effort to get but are much more valuable because of this.

Absolutely, but you see patents for minor variations all the time. Like pharmaceutics that add a vitamin to an existing drug and get a whole new patent for it.

Everything is a combination of prior art. That's how technology works.

There’s “prior art” and “prior art (as defined by patent law)”. They are not the same, in much the way “map” doesn’t mean the same thing to programmers and non-programmers.

Yeah, but what does it take to actually create the provisional patent? Correct me if I'm wrong, but is it not $70 + thousands of dollars in legal fees?

Filing a provisional patent application costs $70 when filing as a microentity (common individual case). You can do it without an attorney (see Nolo Press and others for DIY help).

After filing, the applicant has one year to file a utility application (what most people think of as a 'patent application') based on the provisional application.

The provisional app is never published. If there's no derivative utility app, the provisional sinks out of sight.

I forget the current utility filing fee, but it's a few hundred $ for an individual. Attorney's fees are in the few $K range and worth it if you have a valuable invention.

I’ve gotten them between 500 and 2000 dollars depending on the lawyer.

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