Comment by vaporstun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vaporstun | Hacker News Reader

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Yes. The date of the patent application is the determining date for a patent. I'm thinking that since they filed the application after you were already online, you're probably more or less OK, but patent law is weird.

This is just wrong. I'm growing increasingly frustrated at the number of users here on HN misquoting everything about patents. If you don't know or understand it, it's best not to comment. If this were something technical and you didn't really know the answer and answered as if you did, many people here would be up in arms. This is no different.

That said, while a patent term is calculated from the date of filing, a patentee has no rights until after the patent issues. So if the entity making threats against you has a patent which issues (which sounds like a big if), he can sue you, but only for your acts of infringement after the date the patent issues. Since the patent has not issued yet, he could not sue you for your actions between now and the issue date, only for actions post-issue because that is when that entity's rights begin.

Agreed. Also, depending on this joker's priority date, IF his patent is issued you have a period to contest the validity of his patent by submitting proof you were live (or other documentation showing your invention) and thus your work would be considered prior art.

His patent application will be posted on USPTO sometime in the future depending on when the application was submitted (and well before it is issued, IF it is even issued) so you will be able to see what his claims are.

Ask him for his patent application number, collect ANYTHING you have that shows the earliest point you went public with your invention, and CONTACT A LAWYER.

DO NOT give him a dime.

I'm confused. Is there a way in which what you said contradicted what the parent post said? You seem to be talking about whether the patent can be used before it is granted (obviously not), but the grandparent was talking about whether prior art from between the application and granting would be considered (it won't).

Yes. The parent post to which I responded said The date of the patent application is the determining date for a patent. when discussing whether or not he could be sued post-issue and that is not true. There are 2 dates, the date a patent is filed (which determines term) and the date a patent was issued (which determines rights). Infringement taking place between the date of filing and the date of issue cannot be retroactively litigated in spite of the fact that it occurred during the term of the patent.

The main issue is that there are 2 dates for a patent, and the post to which I responded gave an answer with no clarity or regard for the disparity and seemed to indicate that the OP could be liable for retroactive infringement which is untrue.

It is just dangerous when people here on HN give advice on patent law issues. They are very complex. This is similar to if you went to a lawyer forum and they all claimed to be experts on web technologies, dishing out bad advice (ASP is totally the way to go these days, that ruby on rails thing I hear is a virus that breaks email printers. Therefore, always use Microsoft servers.), but the consequences here are more dire. If you saw lawyers saying that, you'd probably have a brain aneurism.

You thought they discussing whether someone could be sued post-issue for actions between the patent application and the patent issue? I assumed he had been talking about whether someone could be sued for providing a service even if they had begun providing that service before the patent was granted. Now that I reread the discussion, however, I can see that text itself is rather ambiguous and that I had just assumed the interpretation that made sense to me. It seems another poster came to the same conclusion I did, since he pointed out that its the date of invention that the online service would have to precede, not the date of filing.

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