Burying Patents

I've heard that large companies buy and bury HUGE patents that could possibly deface the existance/profits of their company. For example a person makes a device that allows your car to travel 500 miles to the gallon, and then seeing this as a threat, Exxon buys & burys that patent so they can continue to make billions of dollars. Also, I heard someone mention a scientists (maybe someone here has heard of him before) that discovered a way to heal many cancers with an extremely inexpensive material/substance- so as soon as some Big health company caught word of his doings, they somehow sent him to jail & caused havok to his good intentions...

Think of all the possibilities... all the great discoveries.... All the cures that we thought were under development... that have been buried right under our feet...

I find this to be an extremely interesting topic, so please do post any articles or rumors you have heard of about buried patents. Thanks.






EDIT:: The scientist I mentioned above was from Texas. I'm searching google, but haven't found anything as of yet.

[edit on 20-1-2007 by MManchester]

Hm. Well, companies DO buy patents all the time, and people sell them all the time. I have a couple that I would like to trade with a certain large medical imaging company in exchange for free (but restricted in scope) rights on one of theirs. That's how that works a lot of the time. You got chocolate, I have peanut butter, we'll get together and make a new taste sensation.

In terms of "bury", it's not like they can make them go away. They'd still be in the registry. They might have it and not license it out for the duration of the patent, I guess you could call that "buried". Drugs and medical devices can be have their patent terms extended by the Hatch-Waxman act, sometimes.

If it's a patent of interest to the military or government, they can gag a patent under 35 USC 181/182, and it will vanish off the registry, if it's been listed before they realize it, or if they notice it when you file, it will be sent to a board that decides if it gets the gag. If gagged, it's issued a special registry number, and you will be restricted to whom you can grant license to. You still have the patent. If it's used, you still get paid, but you have to apply to agencies that filed the gag for permission to license it out.

In practice, you'll generally get a list of permitted licensees, if someone's interested.

If it's nuclear in nature, and DOE gets antsy, you can also end up with your invention filed as a "born secret" and then you have special issues, but it's a similar process.

Gags and "born secrets" are not done by industry, though, it's usually for stuff you really might not want out, like a new way to make organophosphates or something.

Tom Bedlam, Since you show to be very familiar with patents, do you think the two examples I gave in my first post to be... Conceivable or Far-fetched?

:::EDIT:::

I understand what your saying when you say it would be difficult to completely rid a patent from the earth. If someone bought out the patent of the famous "Pet Rock" and buried it, they would stop producing that particular item, but a bunch of people would still have pet rocks..

As in the case of the scientist I mentioned, I don't know how the health company covered up the ingredients to cure cancer/diseases... Is that information accessable to the public or what? Is that guy that discovered the cure prohibited from saying what it consisted of? Could they have threatened his life if he spoke up? gahhh....

[edit on 20-1-2007 by MManchester]

About 10 years ago there were actually electric cars that could drive just as long and just as fast as the ones we have now. I watched a movie with Martin Sheen talking were they just quietly dissappeared after some companies like Ford, etc bought them out. They shreaded the cars into little tiny pieces of scrap. It made me sick to see basically brand new cars being destroyed like that.

MManchester, could you possibly be talking about the late Dr. Bob Beck?
Two of his lectures (that I know of) can be found on Google Video.
I've been researching Dr. Beck for quite a while now.

I find it: farfetched.

If it's a section 181, it WON'T appear in the patent registry. But if you attempt to patent the same device or one with overlapping claims, you'll find that the patent actually exists, it just doesn't have a main sequence patent number. You'll be denied, and you get an NDA forbidding you to disclose it. That's not so bad if you already have clearance, for a civilian it can be a pain. There's weird extra twists if you file a "born secret" patent and it's already been done.

However, outside of section 181's, you can't vanish it. If it's patented, the patent is there. If the patent were somehow "misfiled", then whoever wanted to could refile it because it doesn't exist, does that make sense? 181's exist, you just can't see them. Unfiled or "vanished" patents don't exist and would be up for grabs for the next guy that wanted to carry a copy of it to the patent office. At any rate, there's a lot of non-government companies that have copies of the entire patent listing, so you'd have to really work at it to make one disappear.

Now, I am always sort of skeptical about sweeping cancer cures, because there isn't a single thing you can call "cancer". There are a lot of different types of cancer and they have pretty different characteristics. Some magic thing that cures all cancer would really make my bs detector go off.

That said, I don't much trust either the AMA or FDA (or for that matter, the USDA). But on the other hand, I don't think there's a magic berry that will cure all cancer either. I do know that they'll lock your butt up for treating patients if you're not a physician. Could that be what happened to the guy in your story? It sounds a bit like Wilhelm Reich, whom I think was a bozo.

As far as the cars go, as Royal mentioned, I suspect that was the EV1. Only 1100 were built, and GM didn't want to maintain them for 10 years. It was a sort of prototype run anyway, and the people that leased them (they were never sold) knew that they were going to be scrapped. As far as the speed and distance, if you were driving 35 on the flats, you could get nearly 150 mile range. But driving normally it was more like 50 miles, and it took quite a while to recharge. Like most electrics, it would have been ok for in-town use.

There was an interesting EV1 prototype with a little APU in the trunk that got nearly 100MPG in normal use.

in the medical field, anything that does not rely on chemicals will be offed very quickly, R.Rife and Wilhelm Reich instantly come to my mind, but there were, of course, many more.

www.abovetopsecret.com...'

if it does rely on chemicals, they'd better be patentable, otherwise the risk is that they ill be outlawed as well, which happened in the case of Tryptophan - one bad (genetically engineered) batch of supplement and off the shelves it went:

www.lightparty.com...

i don't doubt for a second that, say, efficient engines, efficient transmitters and exotic materials are being suppressed - i once heard of a heat resistant compount called Starlite / Starlight...

Yet, if Reich or Rife filed for patents, they'd still be there for all to see.

A lot of these guys suffer from the "the dog ate my homework" syndrome. Moray and Keely also fall into this category.

As far as Starlite goes, as far as I know he sold it to someone. Go back and look at where the press coverage stops, then look through the right funding documents and you might find to whom.

Likely the only thing suppressing HIM is an NDA he signed when he got a check.

Is that starlight compound the chemical they were going to use to paint the outside of planes?? I remember watching something years ago about a compound that resisted heat. I also remember the guy that had a compound (ointment) that if places on badly burned skin would rejuvenate it without any scarring.

It boils down to whether you trust the patent office. i don't deny that there remains some doubt about outlandish claims and exotic techniques and we will never know if Rife's microscope works or not unless we get to use one, but that does not mean that discussing probable suppression is compatible with asking the patent office (or any official and/or controlled instititiion) for verification.

f-ex. the 100mpg carb is reported to exists by various sources and there is a good reason to believe that efficiency can still be improved, contrary to auto makers' claims of high effciency. ideally, CO2 and water are the only byproduct of combustion of hydrocarbons.. do CO2 and H20 smell? do they need catalytic converters? of course not, so this particular rumor is imho quite credible.

PS: if anyone can find Starlite in the patent register, please post it, lol

The inventor stated that he chose not to patent it. Repeatedly. And that's before he suddenly quit doing interviews/got bought out.

As far as the carburetor legend goes, you can find a LOT of patents on such carburetors, especially the ones that heat the gasoline until it gasifies.

And as I was saying upthread, there are a lot of patent registry caches that are independent duplicates of the registry. And you can download any that you want. Your evil suppressors are going to have a tough time keeping up.