Quote:
Originally Posted by wavoman
...and Beyer says it is patented, and make no reference to Smyth ...
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IANAL so don't
count on anything I say here, but at least I do a reasonable amount of work with patent attorneys.
It depends heavily whether they are granted or are just a patent application being processed by the Patent Office - companies have been known to be very loose in their terminology, failing to clearly distinguish between the two.
And it matters
exactly what the patent claims say - because if someone does everything you say in one of your claims except for one tiny element they are not violating your claim.
And the priority date matters if there are conflicting patents (i.e. when the application was filed in most cases), and even then a granted patent may be invalidated after a long and expensive court case if it can be shown that the claimed invention was in existence at the time of filing. There are also variations on some of these issues depending on country.
Most US patents are currently taking four or five years to be initially reviewed by the Patent Office - and often go through multiple rounds of revision before they are issued. This means the issued patent may bear little resemblance to the original filing, and between the Patent Office process and actions by the filer it can take a lot longer than that in some cases before the patent issues.
I talked to a Smyth about patents and the indication was given that they had at least filed some applications, but since they've been working on it for maybe five or six years it's hard to infer when they filed and on what subject matter. The Patent Office is now publishing applications 18 months after filing so you can find them on their website.
You'd need to take a good look at the space to figure out who did what and when and how likely they are to have/end up with a patent that stops a competitor from doing something significant in their own products. In a crowded or complicated field that sort of question may take a team of lawyers a long time to consider.