Not Ringing the Bell

How the structure of intellectual property shifted out from under me just as I became an inventor.I retired from the US Navy, and then the Obama Administration caused the enactment of the “America Invents Act” (ACA).This Act cut the patent fees by 75% for micro-entity stand-alone individual inventors and allowed me to become an inventor around 2012, preparing to file a Patent Pending in 2015, which became a utility Patent in 2016, and was granted on 8 January 2019 as US 10,176,661 B2

In 2012 something else was happening. The entire US Patent system was being invalidated by patent trolls from East Texas, who took over IP law with fraudulent lawsuits filed by fake companies to extract settlements from small company inventors, and they own the Courts there, and they win every time, and now no big company in USA will come anywhere near an inventor, or anywhere near a patent because the whole field has been contaminated and made radioactive by the patent trolls.

So today, in 2021, I own a very valuable patent that has no value whatsoever, and I can’t even talk about selling it because big corporation simply shred all incoming mail from people they do not know including small inventors with patents to sell. The mail is shipped by air to overseas nations where English is spoken. It is analysed for content, and if it relates to a patent it is destroyed.This is not irrational in relation to the Marshall Texas lawsuit factory and the East Texas impact on IP law in USA. It is a rational act by the big corporations to protect their interests. They are not anxious to begin new projects anyway, so looking at patents is doubly dangerous and time wasteful for them. Why would a company even consider putting free cash flow into a new project if it could use that money to buy-in its own shares, raise it’s EPS, reward its shareholders, get big bonus money for its executives, and retire as billionaires? It wouldn’t. They don’t. They shred the mail. They protect themselves and their senior executives.My available recourse is to try to sell my patent abroad where the patent trolls of East Texas have not totally killed IP as a human endeavor.

So my emphasis is on Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, England, Germany, Norway, and Sweden.My granted patent expires in 2038, and I may expire before then. I used to be JAG to a SEAL team, and I am not ringing the bell. Things are in flux. IP may become sellable again. I am seeking new marketing channels. I want my FB friends to bring me a buyer for my patent and will pay 25% of what the buyer pays me to the broker who brings me that buyer. Lucy and the football, with me playing Charlie Brown, and Lucy saying “Come on Charlie, I won’t pull the football away this time so you fall on your back.

“Admiral McRaven used to say that some days no matter how hard you try, you still wind up as a “sugar cookie” (wet, freezing, and covered with sand”). A SEAL does not ring the bell, and neither will I.