Celebration Day - Big Feeling of Accomplishment

For those of you who may not know I am a closet inventor, however, lately I've really been working on coming out of the closet because apparantly my ideas have some merit. How do I know? Well, last year my company decided to file a patent application for an idea I developed and is expected to be published in december of this year. While there is no guarantee the patent will be published, or for that matter that its really worth any real $$$, the thought of having my name in the USPTO database is pretty thrilling.

There are some other ideas I've been working on to send to some larger companies in hopes a development opportunity might arise, one of which is for Motorola. Well during my patent search, I ran across two other issued patents that were nearly identical to what i had intended to do. Two that were identical??? How can that be if the whole idea of a patent is to protect the originality of an idea. I am by no means a patent examiner, but know enough to say that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck. Clearly these two patents were for the same concept but somehow the second slipped by. Normally i would be discouraged by the existence of one similar patent and turned off by two, but part of me believes the invention is somewhat iterative and that innovating on the two predecessors could result in another patent.

The irony in this whole thing is that beyond the so called protection afforded by a patent, there is always the distinct possibility that a really good patent attorney could one day argue in a court of law that one patent infringes on another thus nullifying its worth. So why the heck do we even have patent examiners if the patent issuance process is only a suggestion of originality not a guarantee. grrrrr