Things To Keep In Mind Before Filing A Lawsuit For Patent Infringement
Patents offer legal validity to the right of an inventor to prevent others from making use of his or her invention for their own advantage. They allow the inventor to bring in prosecution against any person or company that is caught making such illegal use of his invention or the process for its manufacture. However, there are a few things that have to be considered before resorting to legal action against a patent infringement.
Firstly, you must ensure that there has been a literal infringement of your product protected by patent. In other words, the alleged product must have imitated all features of your product. Although in special cases where some of the aspects of the product have not been copied, it can still be treated as an infringement. However, you will have to provide valid proof that the major aspects of the infringing product are similar to the patented product in all elements and yield the same result as the patented product.
Secondly, you should have some legal interest in the patented product to be able to prosecute the infringer, and you should not be an unrelated party. You can either be the sole owner of the patented product or a licensee – exclusive or partial – of the product to be able to file a suit for infringement. You also need to take into account the law of limitation of the state and file a suit within the time stipulated for such cases, as otherwise the claim would be treated as invalid.
Though, you have an option of proceeding against the owner or even the user of the counterfeit product, you can take any such legal action only when the patent is yet to expire. Once the span of patent expires, no legal action can be taken against any infringement.
Last but not the least, though patents are based upon the strict liability principle, you should remember that the use of a patent for research purposes is allowed and it is not considered as tantamount to infringement.
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