patent design on a workbench

[m_c]

But if it's in the public domain, and clearly attributal to you, you at least have intellectual rights, for what it's worth

My understanding is you can't patent something that is already in the public domain.

 

[bourbon]

But he hasn't posted a picture, just a very vague description.

 

[Turbo]

There was a farmer over here who came up with a clever idea to remove outer bearing shells stuck in a housing. He won a design award for it. He patented it but keeping it up proved very expensive so he let it eventually lapse.
A few years later I saw his same design being sold by one of the big tool companies.

 

[jenki]

Read up on Ron Hickman and the Workmate, he needed the might of Black and Decker to protect his patent. Always take a royalty on anything you design you might just end up very wealthy.

 

[bricol]

Our parent company has a pretty sizeable legal department specialising in IP and patents. They are busy defending ours (and still lost one with a US company in a US court in the home town of the company infringing . . ) and checking up on filings by competitors in-case they do infringe ours, or if we can side-step theirs to allow our machinery to have the same capability.

I think you might be quite surprised at what you can patent.

While I might be named on a patent, my contract states anything I come up with while employed by the company, in the same field as what the company is in, belongs to the company.