An aspiring inventor often hears ads on TV and on the radio offering help for patenting and/or marketing inventions. Be extremely careful who you hire to help commercialize an idea. There are a lot of scams out there. This blog is the story of what has befallen a large number of uninformed inventors that hired American Inventors Corporation (AIC) to help them obtain patents. This story is from the 1990's, but just recently one of the patent attorneys complicit in the AIC scam was barred from prosecuting patents.
AIC solicited individuals to submit their ideas and offered a free patent search. They would tell each potential client that their idea had great commercial potential, and in a sales presentation offer to help the customer obtain a patent and then to promote the patent to manufacturers. In a contract signed by the customer AIC claimed they would obtain a "patent" for the customer for a fixed fee or a fee plus a percentage of royalties. The fee was refundable if a patent did not issue. No mention was made of the type of patent to be obtained. AIC was to hire a patent attorney or patent agent, and to supervise the application process. Direct communication between the customer and patent attorney was discouraged. When a patent application had been drafted, the company presented it to the customer for signature. Sound good?
AIC would forward the inventors disclosure to a patent attorney , Leon Gilden, requesting a design patent. A design patent protects only the decorative features of a product and does not protect the structural or utilitarian features. The patent attorney added decorative features to drawings on the customer's application (drawings the inventor did not submit) and filed design patents. Thus the customer did not get the patent protection of his idea that he sought and thought was getting. The design patents, which inevitably issued, were worthless.
The patent attorney, Leon Gilden, was punished for taking part in this scam with a 5 month suspension of his licence to represent clients before the patent office. AIC then hired another patent attorney, S. Michael Bender, to prepare and prosecute over 1000 design patents, many left over from the Gilden fiasco. Bender has been excluded from prosecuting patents before the patent office in an appeal of such sentence by a lower court. To read the whole proceedings see:
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/dcom/gcounsel/docs/06-1243.pdf
As far as I know, the company has not been punished for this scam. If you have questions about the legitimacy of an invention promoter or need guidance in how to proceed with the invention process, I suggest you become a member at http://www.inventored.org/ which is an email forum. You can post a question that is sent to all members and you will get answers by email.
Until the next post,
Vernon Sandel
