Patents..? 17 2 1 (12) 25 1 28

I first got involved with patents as Research and Development Manager of the British Paper company that employed me from age 36 years when the department I ran came up with this wound dressing non-woven material which came out top of the pops when, together with a customer in the wound dressing business, lined it up with the best of competitive products on the market at the time in wound healing studies conducted on the backs of pigs in The Royal Stanmore Hospital in North London. The pig's skin apparently closely approximates to that of humans so its healing properties can be used to predict human behaviour. In the fulness of time our two companies were granted a patent for the best available wound dressing and our patent comprised two guys with the same Christian name, E plus my boss the R and D Director, B. A most exciting project to be a part of...

In the process I got to attend a course with the same title perhaps as the book of the guy who gave it entitled "Intellectual Property: Patents, Copyrights, Trademarks and Allied Rights", which is still in print by this Australian Professor, William Cornish. His book became my bible for the rest of my working life and one thing I always recall he said during his lectures was "A patent isn't a patent until it has stood up in court!" Well before I was through I was to stand up in court a total of 5 times first defending a later patent I had little faith in which ultimately was thrown out as not inventive, and then twice again for a successor application only I could be bothered to get involved with, and then finally attacking a competitor's patent which claimed much of the novelty of this whole family of patents... 

The articles of commerce were fibrous food casings which comprised a long fibre paper base built up with regenerated cellulose: the paper base was made by the company I had been R and D Manager of for 13 years before I was persuaded to join one of its customer companies as an R and D Director when I proclaimed many of the products to be over-engineered: these food casings started out at around 32 mm (25,4 mm = 1 inch) in diameter and increased in size to 165 mm in diameter and with each doubling of the diameter food content quadrupled in weight, the paper substrate traditionally increasing from 17 to 19; 19 to 21; 21 to 23,8; 23,8 to 26, and finally 26 to 28 g/m2. Well with my participation we got the range extended from 13 to 15 for smaller diameter casings; and 28 to 32 g/m2 at the top end of the scale to facilitate the manufacture of the world’s lightest fibrous casings and I dare say with the widest variety of size, all the way from 32mm for Italian salami of the type made in Sanfrancisco up to 250mm for the big Mortadella products of Italy: in between these extremes we got to supply intermediate sized casings to Bulgaria and Rumania who hitherto were unable to afford fibrous casings using instead the inferior reconstituted collagen casing…

When I appeared for the second occasion when our first specification was thrown out at the Appeal hearing in the European Patent Office, EPO, in Munich in the Opposition Division, I had taken examples of the casing to show the court only to have one of the challenging lawyers come over to where I was sitting at the end of the proceedings to belittle further our products asking “Who would want to buy these casings anyway?”

What he didn’t know however was that this same patent would be granted in Japan 7 years after filing because the so-called Japanese prior art his and another company had used to bring our patent down had by that time fallen by the wayside, a laboratory animal that wasn’t worth the paper it was written on and therefore not worth the annual charges for its upkeep, the Japanese patent office sensibly waiting 7 years before examining a patent unlike the EPO for example which examines much earlier. Plus the fact that I had anticipated losing the action in the EPO but fortunately had new art coming along that ensured my new specification would be found inventive not only in Europe but also in the USA, where I also succeeded in having it granted.

The German lawyer noted above was present for many of our successive disputes but fortunately he didn’t get to display his hubris a second time around. If I had been quicker witted on the first occasion I might have replied “Why then has your principals spent $10 000’s fighting us, if you can ask “Who would wish to buy them?” but then I am not always so clever or quick-witted, don’t you see? Hahaha, as I hope you too my readership get to have the last laugh sometimes?