From the earliest days of the motor car industry, before the A.L.A.M. was established, patent infringement loomed as a serious and vexing problem.

One of the conditions of the pool was a prohibition upon the withholding of patent rights among A.L.A.M. members.

The prevailing view in the industry was summed up in 1912 by a group of auto makers who told a Senate committee: `` The exceedingly unsatisfactory and uselessly expensive conditions, including delays surrounding legal disputes, particularly in patent litigation, are items of industrial burden which must be written large in figures of many millions of dollars of industrial waste ''.

By that time it was commonly agreed that patent warfare was sapping constructive achievement and blocking the free exchange of technical information.

The idea was never commercialized, but Lincoln is the only president to hold a patent.

*( c ) It may be granted upon condition, cujus est dare, ejus est disponere, and this denization of an alien may come about three ways: by Parliament ; by letters patent, which was the usual manner ; and by conquest.

He was stationed in San Francisco from 1869 through 1871 and he took out a patent for the cable car railway that still runs there, receiving a charter for its operation, but signing away his rights when he was reassigned.

At that time, the ENIAC was considered to be the first computer in the modern sense, but in 1973 a U. S. District Court invalidated the ENIAC patent and concluded that the ENIAC inventors had derived the subject matter of the electronic digital computer from Atanasoff ( see Patent dispute ).

The United States District Court for the District of Minnesota released its judgement on October 19, 1973, finding in Honeywell v. Sperry Rand that the ENIAC patent was a derivative of John Atanasoff's invention.

The case was legally resolved on October 19, 1973 when U. S. District Judge Earl R. Larson held the ENIAC patent invalid, ruling that the ENIAC derived many basic ideas from the Atanasoff – Berry Computer.

The first proposal for a tank was by the Austrian Oberleutenant Günther Burstyn who, in 1911, proposed a design for " motor artillery " ( Motorengeschütz ) with a turret, but his design never progressed beyond a German patent in 1912.

Later that year the PTO issued a decision rejecting the patent, on the basis that the petitioners ' arguments that the plant was not " distinctive or novel " were valid.

A. Panitz's patent, was developed by Mike Miller starting in 1983 and culminated with the first prototype in 1986.

Watterson was born in Washington, D. C., where his father, James G. Watterson ( born 1932 ), worked as a patent examiner while going to George Washington University Law School before becoming a patent attorney in 1960.

The Bakelite Corporation was formed in 1922 ( after patent litigation favorable to Baekeland ) from a merger of three companies: the General Bakelite Company which Baekeland founded in 1910, the Condensite Company, founded by J. W.

The first patent on a ballpoint pen was issued on 30 October 1888, to John Loud, a leather tanner, who was attempting to make a writing instrument that would be able to write on his leather products, which then-common fountain pens could not do.

Slavoljub Eduard Penkala invented a solid-ink fountain pen in 1907, a German inventor named Baum took out a ballpoint patent in 1910, and yet another ballpoint pen device was patented by Van Vechten Riesburg in 1916.

It was based on a patent of 1883 by James Cleminson, and was once popular on narrow-gauge rolling stock, e. g. on the Isle of Man and Manx Northern Railways.

Originally intended as a patent medicine when it was invented in the late 19th century by John Pemberton, Coca-Cola was bought out by businessman Asa Griggs Candler, whose marketing tactics led Coke to its dominance of the world soft-drink market throughout the 20th century.

* 1942 – Actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil receive a patent for a Frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication system that later became the basis for modern technologies in wireless telephones and Wi-Fi.

The NIH later withdrew the patent applications, following public outcry.

Kratt Company, who originally started out making pitch pipes, and later secured the patent for combs made of plastic in 1952.

All of these required much experimentation, but he soon had enough success to patent the process a year later.

The Supreme Court of the United States later invalidated the patent because of an improper disclaimer and, additionally, maintained the technology in the patent was known art when filed.

Brewster later believed he would make money from this popular invention ; however, a fault in his patent application allowed others to copy his invention.

He filed the first patent for an MRI machine, U. S. patent # 3, 789, 832 on March 17, 1972, which was later issued to him on February 5, 1974.

In 1035 Magdeburg received a patent giving the city the right to hold trade exhibitions and conventions, which form the basis of the later family of city laws known as the Magdeburg rights.

He obtained a patent for his detection device in April 1904 and later a patent for a related amendment for determining the distance to the ship.

Almon Brown Strowger filed the first patent for a rotary dial, U. S. patent # 486, 909, on December 21, 1891, that was later issued to him on November 29, 1892.

In 1984 Inge Telnaes received a patent for a device titled, " Electronic Gaming Device Utilizing a Random Number Generator for Selecting the Reel Stop Positions " ( US Patent 4448419 ), which states: “ It is important to make a machine that is perceived to present greater chances of payoff than it actually has within the legal limitations that games of chance must operate .” The patent was later bought by International Game Technology and has since expired.

In their joint 1885 patent applications for novel transformers ( later called Z. B. D.

Three weeks later, Goodyear was awarded a patent in the United States.

Bessemer licensed the patent for his process to four ironmasters, for a total of £ 27, 000, but the licensees failed to produce the quality of steel he had promised — it was " rotten hot and rotten cold ", according to his friend, William Clay — and he later bought them back for £ 32, 500.

Vasilantone would later file for patent on his invention in 1967 granted number 3, 427, 964 on February 18, 1969.

In later patent litigation, Judge Augustus Hand ruled that Thurman " does not appear to have attempted to design a vacuum cleaner, or to have understood the process of vacuum cleaning ".

The patent was later granted.

AOL later acquired Mirabilis, the authors of ICQ ; a few years later ICQ ( now owned by AOL ) was awarded two patents for instant messaging by the U. S. patent office.

However, whereas most libre works grant freedom under copyright law, open source hardware typically depends on exceptions to patent law.

The LAME developers state that, since their code is only released in source code form, it should only be considered as an educational description of an MP3 encoder, and thus does not infringe any patent by itself when released as source code only.

Conversely the final policy represented a victory for business interests ( who feared competition from the government in the area of applied research and who saw Kilgore's patent law proposal as a threat to their property rights ) and for scientists ( who gained control of what would later become an important source of resources and professional autonomy ).

Controversy has arisen because this licensing allows publication of standards requiring licensing fee payments to patent holders, the use of which would effectively eliminate the possibility of free / open source implementations of these standards.

DotGNU ’ s implementation of those components of the. NET stack not submitted to the ECMA for standardization has been the source of patent violation concerns for much of the life of the project.

In September, 2001 it was donated to the public as open source, and On2 irrevocably disclaimed all rights to it, including a royalty-free license grant for any patent claims it might have over the software and any derivatives their patents on the technology, allowing anyone to use any VP3-derived codec for any purpose.

As the patent said such a system " allowed to provide separate supply to several lighting fixtures with different luminous intensities from a single source of electric power ".

Another source has mentioned that IBM reached nonexclusive patent agreements with Nakamatsu in the late 1970s to avoid conflicts.

A patent for a television system was also filed by Zworykin in 1923, but this file is not a reliable bibliographic source because extensive revisions were done before a patent was issued fifteen years later and the file itself was divided into two patents in 1931.

The company's proprietary databases are curated by CAS scientists and recognized by chemical and pharmaceutical companies, universities, government organizations, and patent offices around the world as an important source of chemical information.

Portable. NET's implementation of those components of the. NET stack not submitted to the ECMA for standardization has been the source of patent violation concerns for much of the life of the project.

The purpose of the website was to collect comprehensive information on the many commercial and non-commercial releases of UNIX and UNIX-like code, so as to reduce or eliminate the scope for superficially plausible but ultimately invalid copyright, patent and trade secret claims against Linux or other free and open source software.

A comment by Ellsworth about the increased workload at the patent office, taken out of context and embellished, was apparently the source of an urban legend that a patent office official ( Charles H. Duell in some versions ) claimed that everything which could be invented had already been invented .< ref >

* Some patent disclosures in the software field are not readable to some programmers ; as a result, patents are rarely used as a source of technical information by software developers.

A year later, however, the Columbia Automobile Company was in shambles thanks to internal corruption and low demand for electric vehicles, and the Electric Vehicle Company turned to the Selden patent as an alternative source of revenue.

The end result, the authors claim, is that American innovation is being stifled unintentionally as a result of a few simple bureaucratic changes ( centralizing the appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and making patent application fees the primary source of revenue for the United States Patent and Trademark Office ).

He quoted one source for the statement, “ The Federal Circuit ’ s recent endorsement of patent protection for methods of doing business marks so sweeping a departure from precedent as to invite a search for its justification ” and another for this: “ To call situation following State Street distressing is an understatement.

If the patent does prove to be invalid, it would be a simple matter of enabling support for it in Mesa 3D, a popular open source OpenGL-compatible computer graphics library.

BIGMIN source code for both Z-curve and Hilbert-curve were described in a patent by H. Tropf.

The term is derived from the licensing of the patent and source code copyright intellectual property rights that subsist in the design.

The White-Smith case also appears to be the source of a legal metaphor used in US patent law relating to computer programs.