After long months of drawn out preparation and taking testimony and quibbling you will find, if your legal talent is the smartest, that the patent granted you by the patent office has been sustained by the court. Such a decision may put the other fellow out of the business but it isn’t once in a thousand causes you can collect damages when you win. And from this you will observe that the business of the patent office is not to give you a monopoly but simply to grant you a patent and as to its validity the courts must settle that.
Fig. 82. THE UNITED STATES PATENT OFFICE, WASHINGTON, D. C.
About Paper Patents.—A paper patent is a patent that has been granted by the patent office for a new and novel idea that has never been worked out in practice.
For instance, suppose you get an idea for an invention or an improvement that seems a good thing especially after you have looked up the state of the art, and when you draw it out on paper it seems certain to work. And let’s suppose that for the want of time or money you are not able to experiment on, or build a model of it; and you have fears that by the time you could build the actual machine some one else may have applied for a patent on the same thing.
Of course, you feel you want to protect the idea and to do so you proceed to apply for a patent and in its own good time the patent office grants you one. You have then a thing called a paper patent but you haven’t got the machine, or device or composition to back it up with.
Well, it’s just like writing a book about a trip to the moon; you know how far from the facts your guesses would probably be and it is the same thing with getting a patent before you have made the experiments or built a model.
A paper patent is not usually worth the time and money you spend on it because it lacks backbone, but they have caused many real inventors a deal of trouble and expense in fighting them.