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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (57645)	12/12/2006 12:04:26 PM
From: engineer	Respond to of 196500

All patents stand the same in terms of enforcement, but the marketability of them differ. Sadly in our society, it is the marketing and legal might that determines more about what a patent is worth than the relative merits of the innovation. I have a friend who innovated to make some of the best water filters in the world and got many patents for such. His startup was flying very fast on these patents. Then along came a giant German company who decided they did not want to honor the patents, so they just made the same things and moved into the market space, clearly infringing on the patents. My friend tried to sue them, but the giant german company had alot deeper pockets and many more lawyers than he did and just kept sending more lawyers to tie him up. After 8 years of exhausting work, he finally sold the company for dimes on the dollar. He made out ok with a few million for his work, but the company never recovered. It was bought by the large german company who then owned all the patents they had violoated, thus buying off the lawsuits. The moral of the story here is that unless you have the $B's of war chest and the stomach for years of battle, these giant bullies can just do whatever they like to the small inventor and get away with it. Our patent office and legal system are sissies when it comes to true enforcement and seizure. C2, I like your approach of taking the other side to see just how hard everyone can fight for the ideas. I just hope that triple damages means something to the courts some day. In my case, the managment of Broadcom found a way to stiff alot of people out of options that they rightfully owned by taking their large coporate attorneys and letting them loose to save the billionaire management a few hundred thousand dollars. Aot of small fry got hurt. Perhaps this is why I and people like Daryl Hanna walk around Telluride without a body guard and Samueli has two cars full of them on a daily basis. I guess you get what you pay for.