WilleeCue said:
Do I understand this correctly?
Someone thinks they have an enforceable patent on making a ferrule from Canvas Phenolic?
Here are the facts from the public data bases:
U.S. Patent No. 7,097,570 was issued to Mike Gulyassay with three claims. The broadest of which is: ?1. A jump/break cue for jumping a cue ball and for breaking a rack of pool balls, said jump/break cue comprising: a shaft having a striking end region and a second end, wherein said shaft is progressively tapered so as to be more narrow towards said striking end region than said second end, said shaft comprising a tenon extending in one direction from said striking end region; and a one-piece ferrule-tip permanently disposed on said tenon of said striking end region of said shaft, said ferrule-tip comprising a cylindrical body extending in the one direction to form a hemispherically rounded crown and bore for permanently attaching said ferrule-tip to said tenon, said crown serving as the striking tip for a selected one of striking a cue ball and causing the cue ball to jump in response to the cue being inclined relative to a table where the cue ball is resting or driving the cue ball into a rack of balls to break the rack, wherein said ferrule-tip is made of a material having a hardness of 100 on the Shore-D scale.?
A dependent claim in this patent claims ABS.
If you look at the last 10 words or so of the patent claim, you?ll see that there is a severe limitation in the claim - - ?hardness of 100 on the Shore-D scale.? That is probably why he filed a continuation (daughter case) to gain broader coverage.
The daughter case to this patent is still being prosecuted in the U.S. patent office (11/506,324). That case has claims very similar to the issued patent, except the breadth is much broader and includes ? . . . having a material hardness of at least 100 on the Shore-D scale.? A dependent claim to this application includes C-grade phenolic. The record of this case is a bit odd to me in that some of the original claims have been rejected while some of them allowable, yet there is no real differentiation between the two types. We?ll have to wait in see if the patent office notices their logic error. My guess is that they will not and the patent will issue.
There is no recorded assignment or licensing for either the patent or the patent application, so any dealings with them has remained private.
To clear up an earlier notion, to infringe a patent, EVERY element of a claim must be practiced.
There is pre-grant protection available to patentees. Should the daughter patent application issue as a patent with claims substantially similar to the ones published, the owner (or assignee) can seek damages from an infringer back to the time the infringer has notice of the infringing activity.
If all of this sounds confusing, it is. Like many operations run by the government, the rules and statutes have taken over simple concepts and created a huge mess. Throw in some lawyers, and you create an expensive mess.
