How To Deal With Patent Infringement
Patents offer legal validity to the right of an inventor to stop others from making use of his or her invention for their personal gains. They provide the inventor the right to sue a person or a company for deliberate infringement of his invention or its underlying process. However, there are a few things that need to be kept in mind before taking legal action against a patent 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 must have copied all features of your original product. In certain cases even if not all these features have been imitated by the violating party, the patent can still be treated as having been infringed. However, you will have to provide valid proof that the major aspects of the infringing product are same as the patented product in all respects and yield the same result as the patented product.
Secondly, you must have some legal interest in the patented product to be able to prosecute the infringer, and you must not be an unrelated party. You can either be the sole owner of the patented product or a licensee - exclusive or partial - of the product to be able to file a suit for violation. You also have to consider the law of limitation of the state and take legal action within the time allotted for such suits, as otherwise the claim would be considered as expired.
Although you can proceed against not only the producer of the infringing product but also against the user of the product, any such step can be taken only while the patent lasts. After the expiry of the patent, no use of the product can be termed as an infringement against the patent.
Last but not the least, though patents stand on the strict liability principle, you should remember that the usage of a patent for conducting research is allowed and it is not considered as tantamount to infringement.
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