Word: patentable
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...answer comes often late at night in the middle of a cable-TV show or sometimes on the back of a magazine. For a few hundred dollars, you are told, an invention-promotion company will evaluate your invention, research the patent to see whether anyone else had the idea first, and then contact manufacturers on your behalf. With one good idea, the ads say, you could be sitting on millions...
When the lights came back on, so did Mahaffey's television. Lo and behold, right there on the screen was an ad with a toll-free number for Invention Submission Corp., the nation's largest patent broker and promotion company. He picked up the phone and dialed...
...enthusiastic ISC salesman told him the idea was brilliant--just what every inventor wants to hear--and pressured him to sign up before someone else came up with the same concept. Mahaffey quickly ponied up $625, borrowed from family and friends, for the patent search. "They told me everything out there was based on radio transmissions," he recalls. "I had an original idea, and I had to hurry to protect it. My father had invented the pop-top soda can but couldn't afford to follow through. He still regrets it. I didn't want that to happen...
Within six months of borrowing the money, Mahaffey began to feel frustrated. His first inkling that ISC's promised patent search wasn't as thorough as it told him was a simple Internet search, which turned up several similar devices that were already on the market. As for the advertised promotion efforts, those consisted of "a few brochures and a couple of lines of advertising on the Web," Mahaffey says, calling the promise "a lot of baloney." With no money coming in from the invention, the loan payments to the ISC subsidiary became a burden. "We really struggled...
...treatment of Mahaffey wasn't illegal. However, experts say it is among the nicer things that happen to naive inventors who rely on any one of the dozen or so major players in the industry. Richard Apley, director of the Independent Inventor Programs for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, says flatly that the majority of companies now advertising these inventor services, which generate about $200 million a year, are scams. "They offer a service of sorts but don't really do what they say they will do," says Apley. Nearly every one of their patent searches comes back with...