Resources for Inventors in North East England

On 9 September 2010 Mark Prisk, Minister of State for Business and Enterprise, announced a new collaboration between the British Library, NESTA, Newcastle City Library and Northumberland University for a new Business and IP Centre in the City along the lines of the British Library's Business and IP Centre in London (see "Mark Prisk announces new business advisory service" on the Real Business website).

What's There Now?

That announcement prompted me to look at what is available for private inventors in the North East and indeed the rest of the country. As I want to provide a resource for inventors in the North East I should be very grateful if folk from the region could let me know if I have missed anything. They can get in touch with me either through our contact form or on our local number 0191 580 8090.

Inventors' Clubs

First up is that there does not seem to be a local inventors' club in North-East England. I could not find one either through googling, the excellent WRTI's directory of inventors' clubs or any other source. Now there are patent attorneys and patent clinics in the region so there must be inventors, As inventors like to get together there are almost certainly informal gatherings of inventors. But that is not the same thing as a club with regular meeting, networking and mutual assistance. Having helped set up the inventors clubs in Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield and having supported the ones in Blackburn and Manchester we'd like to help. Again, if any local inventor, patent librarian, business angel, local government officer or entrepreneur would like our help, please let us know.

Clinics

According to the City library website intellectual property advice is available at the City Library in the Charles Avison Building, 33 New Bridge Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8AX on Wednesday mornings and Friday afternoons. Appointments can be booked through information@newcastle.gov.uk or 0191 227 4100. According to the CIPA website this advice is provided by local patent agents.

Libraries

The City Library at 33 New Bridge Street is a member of the PatLib network and offers lots of printed and on-line resources on all aspects of business law including patent, trade mark and registered design searches for which it charges a fee.

Funding
In addition to national banking, angel and VC networks there are several strong local financial institutions. These include the Entrust business angel network and 4 local community development finance institutions, namely Five Lamps, Northern Pinetree Trust, PNE Group and Street North East.

Regional Development

The Regional Development Agency ("RDA") for the North East England is One North East which, of course, will go the way of the other RDAs very shortly (see "Local Enterprise Partnerships begin to take shape" 21 Oct 2010). There is a regional Business Link based at Spectrum 6, Spectrum Business Park, Seaham, SR7 7TT, Tel: 0845 600 9 006. The RDAs will be replaced by local enterprise partnerships ("LEPs") and proposals have been submitted for County Durham, Northumberland, North Tyneside and the whole North East. Some of these can be accessed from the BIS website.

Professional Advice

There are lots of patent and trade mark agents and some law firms that belong to the Intellectual Property Lawyers Association in Newcastle and other towns and cities in the region. We don't yet know any of them well enough to recommend for private inventors who will have limited budgets and would advise such clients to ask around and shop around and let us know what they find. The same goes for accountants, business advisers, marketing consultants, product designers. We have a page on Inventors Resources for North East England on the Inventors Club website which we will update as and when we can.

Further Information

We have an Inventors Club group on Linkedin which covers developments affecting inventors throughout the UK which you can join. You can of course also join the Inventors Club if you want. The Membership Rules are here. There is no subscription but we may charge for special services such as showcasing inventions and access to professional services.

IP Insurance Five Years On

Exasperated by the absence of British companies among the top 10 companies that had been granted UK patents between 2004 and 2005 I wrote in September 2005 the article “Why are there no British Names in the Patent Office's Top Ten?” The reason then as now was that the cost of obtaining and enforcing a patent in the UK was beyond the means of most small and medium enterprises. In the article I discussed the ways in which intellectual property infringement litigation could be funded and came to the conclusion that before the event insurance was probably the best option. The very next day I wrote the article “IP Insurance: Does it Work?” and mentioned one instance where it seemed to do so. The next day in this blog I wrote an article especially on “IP Insurance”.

Since 2005 the following developments have taken place:

· S.74A and s.74B of the Patents Act 1977 (providing for advisory opinions by the Intellectual Property Office on patent infringement and validity) have come into force;

· Sir Rupert Jackson has reviewed and reported on Civil Litigation Costs; and

· the Civil Procedure Rules and Practice Directions have been amended to limit costs in Patents County Court actions at £50,000 on liability and £25,000 on quantum which theoretically makes litigation in the Patents County Court only marginally more expensive than in Germany.

The cheapest intellectual property insurance service that I could find in 2005, Intellectual Property Insurance Consultants, is no longer with us but its prime mover Ian Macleod seems to be working now for Alfa Insurance Facilities. Ian Lewis who made Miller into what appeared to be the market leader in this sector in 2005 has founded Samian Underwriting Agency. David Freer, who used to be with HSBC Insurance Consultants, is now a director of Marsh. However, I have also found several new entrants to the market.

Below are the intellectual property insurance services that I have been able to identify. If anyone knows of any broker, underwriter or other intellectual property insurance service provider that I should add to this list, please let me know.

Service Provider	Contact
Abbey Legal Protection	0870 600 1480
Alfa Insurance Facilities	Ian Macleod 01903 23 22 86
Camberford Law	020 8315 5066
Charles Milnes & Co.	020 7923 4655
Marsh Brokers Ltd.	David Freer 07770 740237
McParland Finn Ltd.	Mark Philimore 0113 366 2369
Miller Insurance	020 7031 2819
Professional Insurance Agents Ltd.	01323 648000
Samian Underwriting Agency	Ian Lewis 020 7954 4430
Temple Legal Protection	01483 577877

Local Enterprise Partnerships begin to take Shape

At their meeting at Bradford on 29 June 2010. the Cabinet resolved to abolish the Regional Development Agencies ("RDAs") and replace them with Local Enterprise Partnerships ("LEPs").

The Ministers' Letter

That same day Dr. Vince Cable, the President of the Board of Trade etc, and Mr. Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for Communities, sent a letter to local government and business leaders inviting them to arrange for local groups of councils and business leaders to come together to develop proposals for such LEPs.

LEPs' Powers

It is clear from the ministers' letter that these new LEPs can be nothing like as powerful as the RDAs they are intended to replace. For a start, attracting inward investment, sector leadership, business support and innovation and access to funds are to be handled nationally while regional strategy is to be abandoned altogether. The new partnerships will be left with such weighty matters as planning, housing, local infrastructure and business startups. The letter envisaged equal representation for local government and business on the governing bodies and that those organs would usually be chaired by a prominent local businessman.

Deadlines Missed and Kept

Dr. Cable and Mr. Pickles promised a white paper on "sub-national" (the adjective "sub-national" apparently being Newspeak for "regional") growth by the summer. As it is now October that has clearly not happened Even though the government has missed its own deadline it insisted on submissions from local authority and business syndicates by 6 September. This was a very tight deadline slightly over 2 months from the original letter that appears to have taken no account of annual holidays.

Proposals Received So Far

Remarkably, nearly 60 proposals were received by that deadline. Some of these have been published on the grandiloquently named Department for Business, Innovation and Skills's ("BIS") website. If the ministers had seriously hoped that groups of local authorities and businesses would get together, they must be disappointed. For the Greater Newcastle conurbation there have been no less than 4 separate proposals from Northumberland and North Tyneside, Newcastle and Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland and County Durham. Several proposals cover the same area: the Greater Manchester metropolitan authorities and the Peel Group have both submitted proposals for Manchester and there are separate proposals for the Gatwick Diamond and the "Brighton and Hove, Croydon, the Gatwick Diamond and West Sussex - Coast to Capital" project. Instead of local collaboration the proposals appear to show a revival of local rivalries.

Funding

Some clues as to funding that may be available after the dismantling of the RDAs come from two consultation papers which BIS did get round to publishing over the summer:

• a green paper on a £1 billion regional growth fund announced by the Cabinet in Bradford "to encourage private sector enterprise, including social enterprise, and capacity, and in doing so create opportunities for people and places to adjust to reductions in public spending"; and
• "Financing a Private Sector Recovery" (Cm 7923) a consultation on access to funding in the private sector.

It is clear from those consultation documents that only money that could be available to the LEPs will be the regional growth fund. My initial view is that £1 billion spread over 8 of the 9 regions of England is not very much. Such a sum is unlikely to create much opportunity in places where there are likely to be massive public expenditure cuts.

Local Business Advice

One of the first casualties of the abolition of the RDAs are likely to be local and regionalBusiness Link services. In an interview with Jason Hesse on the Real Business website, Mark Prisk, the Business Minister, announced:

“We’re going to wind down the Regional Development Agencies, and as part of those, we’ll be winding down the regional Business Link contracts.”

These will be replaced by a state funded online service - presumably the existing Business Link website possibly under the "Solutions for Business" brand - and greater use of existing service providers such as chambers of commerce and local authorities. The proposal for a new business information service to be provided by thee British Library, NESTA, Newcastle City Council and Northumbria University is probably something like the model Mr. Prisk had in mind (see "Mark Prisk announces new business advisory service" on the Real Business website).

Enforce a Confidentiality Agreement for as Little as £475

Most inventors learn from the Intellectual Property Office (“IPO”), librarians, Business Link advisors, patent attorneys and each other that they should disclose their inventions only in confidence. They know that they should ask business partners, investors and others to sign instruments like the IPO’s “Confidential Disclosure Agreement”.

But what happens if a person who has signed one of those agreements breaks his or her promises by making the invention or disclosing it to a third party? Theoretically the inventor can claim an injunction, damages or other relief for breach of confidence. If he or she acts quickly enough, the inventor can apply to the court for an injunction to restrain the breach until trial. But an application of that kind can cost thousands of pounds. There are not very many individuals or indeed businesses with that kind of money.

Before the Access to Justice Act 1999 legal aid was available for that kind of action. Unfortunately para.1 (h) of Sched. 2 of that Act now excludes business disputes from legal aid. Many unscrupulous opportunists are aware that civil litigation is not an option for their victims if they disregard their obligations.

However, civil litigation is not the only means of enforcement. Parties to an agreement can agree to refer any dispute or difference arising from their agreement to a tribunal of their choice known as an “arbitrator” who will determine the dispute in accordance with the law and evidence in much the same way as a judge would though in private and at a time and place of the parties’ choosing. That is a process known as “arbitration”. It is one of several alternatives to the courts that are bundled together under the label “alternative dispute resolution” or ADR.

There are many types of dispute for which arbitration is more appropriate than litigation. If a case turns on a technical issue as happens frequently in civil engineering, the issue is more likely to be understood by an arbitrator who has spent his lifetime in that profession than by a judge who has spent his in the criminal or divorce courts. If the parties are from different countries and neither is comfortable with the legal system of the other they can refer their dispute to a neutral that they both trust. Yet another type of case appropriate for arbitration are disputes between trade mark owners and proprietors of domain names that are the same or similar to the mark as to who should own the domain name. The parties to such disputes need a process that is fast and fair but also inexpensive. Procedures like the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (“UDRP”) deliver a binding decision within a few weeks of the complaint for as little as US$1,500.

There is no reason why a process like the UDRP should not be used to resolve other types of intellectual property dispute such as those that subsist between inventors and their collaborators, investors, licensees and other third parties. NIPC Ltd has established such a process called NIPC Arbitration. This is “a low cost dispute resolution service for intellectual property, technology, media and entertainment cases” inspired by the UDRP and similar schemes. NIPC Arbitration can deliver an order to refrain from breaching a promise not to use or disclose confidential information within a few days of the reference for as little as £475 (£250 to the arbitrator for a telephone hearing lasting less than an hour plus £100 to the company for registration, another £25 for appointing the arbitrator and £100 for arranging the hearing). Rule 5 of the scheme’s Arbitration Rules confers on the arbitrator all the powers of the court including the power to grant interim injunctions. The risk to the inventor is limited by rule 11 (4) which limits costs to those that would be awarded by a hearing officer in an Intellectual Property Office tribunal which very rarely exceed £3,000 and are usually much lower. An award by an arbitrator is as good as a judgment for most purposes and can be backed up if necessary by the courts.

NIPC Arbitration is by no means the only arbitration scheme but it is the only one that is tailored to IP disputes involving individual inventors, start-ups and other small businesses. Key to the scheme is an arbitration clause which refers disputes to an NIPC arbitrator under the NIPC Arbitration Rules. Examples of such clauses are to be found on the Arbitration Agreement Page of the NIPC website.

For more information fill in the on-line contact form or visit www.nipcarb.co.uk .

Keeping the sharks at bay

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Keeping the sharks at bay

View more presentations from Jane Lambert.

Leeds Inventors’ Club: 21 July 2010

On Wednesday I gave a talk to Leeds Inventors’ Club entitled “Keeping the Sharks at Bay: Resolving Disputes between Co-Inventors, Licensees, Investors and Third Parties”. In it I took four typical case histories which had given rise to difficulties for individual inventors and suggested some remedies. In other words, turning shark into delicious shark’s fin soup. I have amended the slides to take account of the site’s format and posted them toSlideshare.

NIPC Clinics go nationwide

Ever since February 2005 Jane Lambert has provided 30 minutes of her time to up to 4 members of the public on the last day of every month absolutely fee of charge. She calls these advice sessions "clinics" and you can get some idea of what goes on at these sessions from the clinics website at www.nipc-clinics.co.uk  or from her post "Tales of the Patent Clinic" on the IP Yorkshire blog.  These clinics have proved very popular and Jane has responded to requests to open others elsewhere.   She now has 8 of them in Barnsley, Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield, Leeds, Rotherham and York in Yorkshire and another at Bromborough in the Wirral.

That is as much as any one woman can manage and we have reluctantly had to turn down requests to extend that network until now.   However, from 1 October NIPC clinics will go nationwide.   Inventors or business people can fill in a form online or call one number which will enable us to identify the problem and identify who is best suited to help resolve it.   We will then arrange for the client to meet a local professional well suited to assist him who may be a barrister, solicitor, patent attorney, trade mark attorney or a member of some other profession. The professional will give the client up to 30 minutes of his or her time absolutely free.

All the professionals in Yorkshire and the North-West who have participated in our programme have picked up work through the clinic.   We are therefore about to recruit solicitors, patent and trade mark attorneys, accountants, business and other advisors throughout the country to assist us.  

Rocky Mountains Inventors' Association

One of the delights of travelling through the New World is finding little bits of home beyond home. For example, when I was a graduate student at UCLA in the early 1970s there was "Ye Mucky Duck" and "The Brigadoon" whenever I felt homesick. Near Boone, North Carolina there was a village called Tynecastle where they actually held highland games.   In Victoria, British Columbia they play cricket and replicate Anne Hathaway's cottage - complete with her husband's second best bed. In Trelew, Argentina there's a "Canolfan Dewi Sant" right in the town centre.

And if any of our us from the land of Newton, Brunel, Darby, Crick, Stephenson. Farraday, Jenner, Whittle, Babbage, Turing, Berners-Lee, Swan, Watt, Trevithick, Dunlop, Shaw, Logie Baird and Cockerell ever stray into Colorado we'll find like minded souls at the Rocky Mountain Inventors Association.  The mission of the Association is almost identical to that of the clubs in Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield:

"The mission of The Rocky Mountain Inventors Association (RMIA) is to promote successful product commercialization and protection by offering information, education, and guidance including business contacts and networking opportunities."

Like us it has inventor and service provider members.   I learned about the Association from one of those service providers, Kevin Houchin, since we follow each other on "twitter.".

The activities of the Colorado inventors are remarkably like those of the Northern Clubs.   They have regular talks by folk like Kevin. Yesterday, for example, he was talking about trade marks and domain names which gives me an idea for what to do in Sheffield on Monday.   Maybe we can make use of the Internet to link together with Kevin telling us about protecting and promoting innovation in America and maybe some of us telling our American colleagues about what happens here.

Investing wisely in IP - my 6-Point Plan for any Business

A patent, copyright, trade mark, registered design or other IP right is nothing more than a right to bring a law suit. Its purpose is to protect the income generated by an intellectual asset, that is to say, a brand, design, technology or creative work.   Such protection does not come cheap.   According to research commissioned by the EPO, it costs €32,000 to obtain a typical European patent and maintain it for 10 years.   That is an awful lot of money to spend considering that most patents are never worked.   Enforcement is even more expensive. IPAC (HM government’s high level advisory committee on intellectual property) estimates that a patent infringement action costs £1 million in the High Court.  That explains why I have seen far more businesses fail from having too much IP than from having too little in my 32 years at the English bar.  

Yet there are circumstances in which a business needs to protect its investment in branding, design, technology or creative works. How does a businessman or woman recognize such circumstances and how does he or she choose the optimum legal protection.   Here is a simple 6-point plan that can apply to just about any business.

1.   Choose a period in which you expect your business to develop.   This can be any period of your choosing which will probably depend on the nature of your business and products and services.   For a company in the fashion or novelties business this could be a matter of months or even weeks.   For a pharmaceutical company it could be decades.

2.   Identify the main income streams that you expect to develop in that period.   IP is intended to protect income streams,   If your invention is never going to earn money whether directly or indirectkly through sale or licensing why waste thousands of pounds on patenting it?  Similarly, if you have no sales in country X and are never likely to have any why seek intellectual property proteciton there? You may want tpo protect yourself in country X it it has a sufficient industrial base to allow a competitor to set up there but, if not, why bother?       

3.   Consider potential threats to each of those income streams.   Competition from competing products or services may be one but there may be others such as changing patterns of demand or the general economic situation.

4.   List possible counter-measures to those threats.   Most of these will be commercial rather than legal such as cutting your prices or developing new products or services but for some threats such as plagiarism you may actually need some legal protection such as a patent or design registration.

5.   If any of those counter-measurers is an IP right, choose the most appropriate one for your business.   There is usually a choice. For instance, one way of protecting a new product or process is simply to keep it under wraps and seek to rely on the law of confidence to prevent unauthorized use or disclosure. The other is to proclaim it to the world in exchange for a temporary monopoly of the manufacture, sale and use of the product or use of the process (otherwise known as a “patent”). Where the technology has only a short shelf-life, a 20-year monopoly is otiose.   On the other hand, if you are a drug company which has invested millions in R & D in a new product and waited years for approval from drug licensing authorities you need patent protection in every country of the world of you are to see an adequate return on your investment.

6.   Ensure that there is adequate funding for enforcement proceedings.    Unless you can afford hundreds of thousands of pounds on litigation and can risk at least as much again if you lose your case with equanimity you should think of IP insurance.   Though these articles need to be updated you can start with two articles that I wrote in September 2005: “IP Insurance. Does it Work” (IP/IT Update) and “IP Insurance” (NIPC Inventors Club).

These and other tips are all set out in my presentation to Leeds Inventors Club “So you think you want a Patent?” which I gave on 18 April 2008.   I also discuss them in my book “Enforcing Intellectual property Rights” which appeared earlier this month. 

Sheffield Inventors Club, 2 March 2009, 18:00

Just a reminder of the meeting of the Sheffield Inventors' Club on Monday 2 March at 18:00..   

Prof Ron Jones will give the talk on how to bring your invention to market that he was prevented form giving last month by the  weather.   

The meeting will take place at Central Library, Surrey Street, Sheffield as usual.

IP Strategy: IP Asset Maximizer Blog

Over the 30 plus years that I have been at the English Bar I have seen far more businesses ruined by acquiring too much IP than too little.  That is particularly true of private inventors who apply for the most extensive patent, design and trade mark protection around the world long before they know whether they will ever sell a single product.

I have no reason to believe that patent agents act from anything but the purest motives and professionalism when they advise their clients of the narrow geographical extent of a British patent and "the inconvenient truth" (to quote a former US Veep) that the invention is made available to everyone in the world including persons skilled in the art way beyond the boundaries of the country for which the patent is granted.  When asked what can be done in say France to prevent then infringement of a British patent the answer is of course nothing.   The remedy is to get a grant for France, and then the rest of the industrial world until the client has spent his entire life savings.

And what does the client have to show for all that expense? Unless he has an income stream to protect and the wherewithal to protect it, NOT A LOT.   Inventors have to be reminded that it costs €30,500 to maintain a typical European patent in 5 countries for 10 years and that most inventions are never worked.   For them the Office fees, patent attorneys' charges, their disbursements and other expenses is MONEY DROWN THE DRAIN.

When I tell my inventors that at my IP Clinics or inventors' clubs they refuse to believe it because that is contrary to what they are told by patent agents, Business Link and each other.   Imagine my delight, then, at encountering a blog that is devoted to IP strategy.   Jackie Hutter's blog IP Asset Management  is exactly that.   Packed to gunnels with good articles it is.   Here are some examples:

• A Consumer Product Company's Costly Patent Lesson: It's Not Enough to Protect the Invention, the Innovation Must Also be Patented
  
• Chief IP Counsel: Stop Trying to Change How Your Lawyers Bill You and Focus on the Model They Use to Provide Your Legal Services
  
• What is an IP Strategist? A Lawyer Who is Not Afraid to Say No.
  

Ms Hutter, who lives in Decatur, Georgia in the USA appears to know what she is talking about. She has 13 years experience in advising companies, investors and universities on how to maximize intangible asset value by developing and executing on IP and patent strategy.   

The URL of this lady's blog is at http://www.ipassetmaximizer.com/ and one can follow her on twitter at http://twitter.com/IPStrategist if one does not have anything better to do than look out for banalities (though never from Ms Hutter) in 140 letters or less.   Talking of twitter, my thanks to @jefflindsay for bringing this blog to my attention.

The Downturn may be the Best Time to commercialize your Invention

Since October I have been making the rounds of the Northern inventors' clubs with my presentation, "The Coming Economic Downturn: How it will affect Inventors and what they can do". My message is necessarily gloomy but I try to finish on a high note that an economic downturn is often the best time to start a business. There are a number of reasons for this. Costs are low. Governments tend to prime pumps. At a time when most businesses are shedding labour rather than recruiting most entrepreneurs have much less to lose.

That message is usually received scepticlly so I was heartened considerably by Sanjiv Buttoo's feature on the BBC website "Business brains urged to take the plunge". The article features an interview with Ajaz Ahmed who started Freeserve in 1998. When the service was launched, most homes in the UK connected to the Internet through an 0845 number for which they were charge local calls on top of an annual or monthly subscription to their Internet service provider. The idea behind Freeserve was to take a share of the charge for the telephone call rather than charge a subscription. This simply proposition proved extremely popular with the result that Freeserve became the biggest ISP in Britain. Its growth attracted the attention of the French giant Wanadoo which is a subsidiary of the French national telephone company.   Freeserve merged with Wanadoo giving Ajaz  a very substantial share of the merged company.

The reason I happen to know all this is that Ajaz is a local lad and he is involved with a number of institutions with which I am also interested.   There include the Media Centre where our chambers are based and the University with which we have worked. The article begins with the words:

"Budding entrepreneurs should take advantage of the current economic downturn and take the plunge, a self-made millionaire from West Yorkshire is urging."

"Exactly the message I have been putting about in my presentation," I thought to myself. "If the inventors won't take it from me maybe they will take it from someone who has actually made his fortune and at a fairly young age."  

The articles continues with the following admonition from Ajaz that despite the downturn in the economy, now is the time make money

"You can negotiate a good deal on renting a shop or unit, hiring staff, advertising or even buying cheaper raw materials 

Now is the time to start up with minimal costs, but you need to have that idea or you're wasting your time."

Exactly! The article continued with some examples of people in and around Huddersfield who were actually doing this. Mohammed Ramzan who is also in the Media Centre and even more impressively a couple of schoolboys from Elland who seem to making serious money from publishing their own magazine.

If any reader wants to take not my advice but Amjad's he or she will get a lot of help. Not just from me but from the patent and trade mark agents, solicitors, accountants, marketers, product designers and other experts on my IP Yorkshire panel if they happen to live in Yorkshire.   You can access their expertise in many ways, through the Leeds and Sheffield inventors clubs and the clinics in Barrnsley, Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield, Leeds and Rotherham. 

If you don't live in Yorkshire, don't worry. I am setting up similar networks in other regions starting with the North West so we shall soon be able to help you wherever you live. Ajaz emailed me yesterday when I said I liked his sentiments: 

"in all this doom and gloom there are opportunities for the brave one, lets hope we see success stories emerging from this sad period."

Let's make sure that happens.

A Very Sad Tale Indeed: Forrester Ketley & Co v Brent

In Forrester Ketley & Co v Brent [2008] EWHC 3150 (Ch) (19 Dec 2008) Mr. Justice Morgan had to deal with no less than 53 applications for permission to litigate in all sorts of matters including petitions for his bankruptcy and charging orders over his home. 

The reason the applicant needed permission to litigate is that he had been subject to a series of civil restraint orders that required him to apply for permission to the court before going to law. Those orders had been imposed because he had attempted in previous proceedings to join the Crown, the Department for Constitutional Affairs (as the Ministry of Justice was then called), the Lord Chancellor, various judges, and the entire partnership of his opponent's solicitors and had embarked on satellite litigation seeking criminal sanctions against the High Court, the Court of Appeal, various members of the Court of Appeal, and the Health and Safety Executive. He had also tried to sue the UK government, the other side's solicitors and PAMIA in the European Court of Human Rights. All this derived from a claim in 1994 for fees of £4,400 by a firm of patent attorneys and a counterclaim of £5,000 for alleged overpayment and negligence which spawned 100 pages of pleadings by the time it was struck out by the Patents Court in 2003.

This exceedingly sad case would seem incredible to most folk but it is sadly believable to anyone who has ever worked with private inventors. The brilliance of the bright idea and the lure of riches beyond the dreams of Croesus beguile to the extent that some become obsessed with their invention and a few even unhinged. Charles Dickens knew of this tendency and wrote about it in his novels and short stories.  The conditions seems to begin with unfounded optimism: "I've checked round B & Q and can find nothing like it on their shelves" or "sales of trundle humpers amounted to umpteen billion pounds last year and I only have to sell 1% to make so many millions."

In the first few pages of "A Better Mousetrap, The Business of Invention"  Peter Bissell and Graham Barker warn that the vast majority of patents are never worked, that most of those that are do little more than cover their costs and only a tiny percentage of the rest ever make serious money.