You Can Patent A Rock?

[MMatt]

So I am an avid fisherman and am continually seeking business opportunities surrounding this as I have knowledge in the sport.

I came across a youtube video featuring stone fishing weights. After some brief research I found only three company producing these, only one of which is American with good marketing and a nice website. The competition is alright as I have ideas to market them towards a different group of people.

Two of the companies claimed these were patented items or patent pending. After some more research I did in fact find a patent.

Patent EP1599091B1 - Angling rig - Google Patents

Basically this is a rock with a hole drilled in it, some epoxy and a piece of metal, otherwise known as a swivel. I'm referring to it as a piece of metal for ease of description.

So after seeing this patent it seems the market is closed to new entrants. So my question is: how could I get around a patent for such a simple item? Is it possible or is the market completely closed do to the patent? Prior to this I always thought patented items needed a certain complexity or amount of moving parts to be patented and your application is denied if it does not comply with this criteria. Now, discovering a rock with a piece of metal attached holding a patent, I guess I was incorrect in my assumption.

 

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[tamo42]

You can work out a licensing deal with the patent owner, come up with a different enough design to get your own patent, or just go ahead and play the odds that you'll be able to settle any lawsuits that come up.

 

[JAJT]

From my limited, limited patent knowledge (I am obviously not a lawyer, I've merely attended a few patent seminars our corporate lawyer puts on for us):

- You can't patent an idea or product, you can only patent the execution. Sticky notes, the concept, aren't patented. 3M's easy-to-remove adhesive formula, their name, the size, shape, color, position of the adhesive, etc... combine to make their patent. Notice a ton of sticky notes that aren't 3M? They've modified the execution such that it does not infringe.

- Obvious ideas are not patentable. A court could rule that using rocks as weights for fishing is not a novel, unique idea and it is reasonable to assume someone else would have come to the same conclusion unprompted. I believe Samsung had a suit against Apple recently trying to claim "slide to unlock" on phones is a reasonable conclusion for a hardware manufacturer to come to when designing an unlocking system for a touch screen. Of course this can be countered with "if it was so obvious, why are we only seeing it now?", which is a very good question when trying to claim something isn't not novel - if nobody took advantage of this idea with plenty of opportunity, maybe it IS novel, just simple.

If I were you I'd do something slightly different - use a different hook design, a special epoxy for superior bonding strength, and maybe locally, hand-picked rocks, or whatever. Something to say "It's the same, but different".

Again, I may be wrong on the above two points. If there is one thing I've learned in being around patent talk it's that there is a damn good reason company's hire full-time lawyers to handle it.

 

[MMatt]

Thanks for the info. I read over the entire patent I linked and it did go into thorough explanation of how to produce the weight. It seems almost everything under the moon is covered. I suppose I could use a different adhesive as that claims to use plain old JB weld and use tumbled local stones only. Maybe I could include color descriptions and a superior metal for the swivel. The sticky note comparison painted the picture.

 

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[q-base]

If the patent says something about adhesive, then just make something where you screw the fastener in. Drill all the way through and use a nut and bolt - there are lots of ways to make them using other techniques. As an alternative you could make a cheap mold and pour concrete into it - then you are not using stone. Colour the concrete before or after, if there for some reason should be a concrete-fishing-weight-patent.

 

[MMatt]

Good thinking, however, drilling a hole all the way through a stone is not easy. I would be going through bits like crazy doing it by hand. A water jet like you would find in a machine shop might be capable of this, though. The concrete idea eliminates the need to drill holes which is the most difficult part. The problem I see is getting a heavy enough weight without it being very bulky. 2-3oz of cured concrete is significantly more in volume than 2-3oz of lead. Your ideas could cultivate others though, so thank you for the insight.

 

[q-base]

The volume of concrete would be larger, compared to lead - yes. But weren't you looking at stones. As far as I know the density of concrete, is only slightly below some of the heavier stone densities. 2.4 for concrete as opposed to, let's say granite which has 2.6-2.7 g/cm3.

On a less serious note, because it is probably either too expensive or to hard to get by, Ducrete(Depleted Uranium Concrete) is 5.6-6.4 g/cm3.

You could also just have a lead weight, and then pour a shell of concrete around it.

 

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