On Wed, 25 Jun 2025 22:08:37 +0000, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>On Wed, 25 Jun 2025 15:24:43 +0000, MitchAlsup1 wrote:>
>Back in my heyday of patent filings (1983-2000), every computer>
architect was reading the same academic and industrial literature, had
access to the same fabrication technology, went to the same
conferences,...--it is any wonder why we reinvented each other's ideas
??
There was a time, I recall, when the legal advice from a company???s
lawyers
to its staff was *not* to read about other people???s patent filings.
That WAS the case here
A different world to what I am used to.
While not unheard of, priority disputes in the chemical industry are
very rare. Polycarbonate was one famous case where this happened,
between Bayer and General Electric (which was made more complicated
because the US had a "fist invented" rule, which actually meant
"first invented in the US", so a foreign inventions and priority
dates were hard to recognize - details may be off).
One reason may be that developments are more long-term, and that
you need lab results and tests for many things, which take time
and money.
Another one, especially for the pharmaceutical industry, is the
sheer number of possible chemical compounds, which by far (and by
this I mean orders and orders of magnitude) greater than the
number of atoms available to synthesize them. Just look
at https://oeis.org/A000628 , which only lists alkanes.
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