So did this mean that the first party that applied for a patent was granted it, with no attempt to confirm that he was in fact the inventor? I'm no t an expert on patent law, but maybe that's not too different from what hap pens in other countries, if no one contests the patent. I expect the Pat ent Office will research whether any prior patents exist for the same or si milar devices, but if they turn up no prior patent, they may be in no posit ion to judge whether a design is in fact original. So the truth may be t hat the burden is on others who may have been the true originators of a des ign to be aware of an unjustified application and contest it. So maybe t he French were just explicitly stating what was tacitly understood in other countries.
There are at least a few examples of totally unjustified patents being gran ted on an important design of which the recipient was not even remote ly the originator. Perhaps the most famous was the (Seldon??) patent on the automobile which Henry Ford was finally able to contest and overcom e some years after it had been granted. As I recall, the loophole was th at the patent had specified a two-stroke engine, and Ford overcame it by us ing a four-stroke. I believe there were also some patent fights conne cted with the basic technology of radio, and in my industy, there is an inf amous patent granted to Unocal for almost every conceivable recipe for maki ng reformulated gasoline, none of which they invented. This last I once heard described as equivalent to granting someone a patent on chocolate cak e, with the claimed "innovation" being that chocolate is an ingredient. Not sure there are any such examples of unjustified patents in the bicycle industry, although there have been a number of battles over whether this o r that device infringed what was usually a valid and reasonable patent, whe ther or not it was found to apply to the design in dispute.
Regards,
Jerry Moos Big Spring, Texas, USA
--- On Thu, 9/18/08, Toni.Theilmeier@t-online.de <Toni.Theilmeier@t-online. de> wrote:
From: Toni.Theilmeier@t-online.de <Toni.Theilmeier@t-online.de> Subject: [CR]SDGD To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org Date: Thursday, September 18, 2008, 6:55 AM
Serge Lapointe writes in his {quot}L´histoire des brevets{quot} that an 1844law said that Sans Garantie du Gouvernement meant that since therewas no procedure to examine inventions,the State did not take any responsibility that the inventiondescribed in the patent was original, did neither check its merits nor theexactness of its description. Neither did the State guarantee that the
patented invention would work.The law was cancelled in Regards, Toni Theilmeier, Belm, Germany.