The title of this post is taken from a bit that was used recurringly on Sesame Street when I was a kid. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that in every industry (even those found outside the DC beltway), there will be some unscrupulous people. Patent practice is no exception, one of the more notorious examples in this business being invention promotion schemes.
This morning I opened my mail and found yet another example. The letter I received is reproduced below; click on the letter for a larger, more legible image. (A caveat: although I am now the attorney of record on this application, I didn’t draft it. Nor, as will be explained below, the did the in-house patent agent for Quark.)
As you can see from the “Dear Sir or Madam” paragraph, this outfit is making the generous offer to “register your patent in our private database”, which will be sent as a searchable CD ROM. All for the low, low price of $2717. Wow. Great idea! A searchable database. Who’d a thunk it? I mean, WIPO already provides a searchable database online for free, but now I can pay these guys for the same privilege! What’ll they think of next?
It’s too bad they didn’t come up with this idea pre-Bilski: then they might have been able to patent their idea for bilking money from unsuspecting inventors. They could have titled the application, “Method for Separating Fools from their Money”.
OK, so these guys are knowingly marketing a worthless product. Wouldn’t be the first time that happened. But if you’re going to do that, at least make a good sales pitch. Here, you don’t need to be a patent professional to know that something is amiss: it’s pretty hard to have a patent application that publishes before it’s filed. Yet that’s what they’re telling me: the application was filed in October 2008 and published six months earlier, in April 2008. Steee-rike one!
Furthermore, the terms of the offer are stated to “printed on the back of this paper”. The back of the paper is blank. Steee-rike two!
And the kicker: this application wasn’t filed in the name of Quark Pharmaceuticals, it was filed in the name of the sole inventor as inventor and applicant; and that sole inventor isn’t one of the seven inventors listed on the sheet IPTD sent me. Steee-rike three! Yer out! (I suspect that IPTD confused this application with PCT/IL2008/000503, a filed a day earlier at the Israel receiving office and published the same day as WO 2008/126085…although that application only lists one inventor, not seven. It appears IPTD can’t even get its mistakes right.)
What I find intriguing here is, what kind of an idiot tries to sell a database product, let alone a worthless database product, by demonstrating to his potential clients complete and utter incompetence at data entry and management? Even if this were a legitimate operation, and there was some added value in the database (as is the case, for example, in STN’s full-text US patents database, which adds CAS registry numbers for chemical compounds to patents that one can otherwise search for free), I wouldn’t give these guys a penny after seeing how they completely screwed up the particulars on the offer sheet.
I also wonder just who they’re targeting, and how they expect to make money. This letter was addressed to me, a patent professional. But no patent agent or attorney is going to be fooled by this ruse. If they’re targeting unsuspecting pro se applicants, hoping to make practical use of P.T. Barnum’s observation that there’s a sucker born every minute, then why send the letter to the applicant’s representative? Why not save money and send letters directly to pro se applicants or to sole inventors?
