Aluminium thikness...?

Instaboat copy

Dear Brock,

I have understand you like our product instaboat and want to build one. Nice, but if you do that, I suggest to go one the web site www.instaboat.com and look for Francois the president to know about the copyright law.
Best regards

 

Not sure about Bulgaria, but a patent in the USA is generally good for 17 years. If the boat was invented in 1978, then the U.S. patent has expired.

Anyway, considering that I got 50 hits when I entered the words "folding boat" in the U.S. patent quick search engine, including four titled simply, "folding boat", I seriously doubt you have anything to worry about from a legal standpoint.

 

Mean we can copy without permission all design that is 17 years old? I think a lot of the classic boat design have to worry then

 

Why should I contact your president?!!!
I do not intend to organize batch production of this boat. Even if that is so, you have not patented it in Bulgaria and if I want I can produce it and sell it in BG and in some other countries – but I don’t want - I want to build one for personal use and as a hobby.

 

Term of patent in the United States​

In the United States, under current patent law, the term of patent is either 20 years from the earliest claimed filing date or 17 years from the issue date, depending on the filing date and the issue date (provided that the maintenance fees are paid in due time):

For applications that were pending on and for patents that were still in force on June 8, 1995, the patent term is either 17 years from the issue date or 20 years from the earliest claimed filing date, the longer term applying.
For applications filed on or after June 8, 1995, the patent term is 20 years from the earliest claimed filing date.
The patent term in the United States changed in 1995 to bring the US patent law in conformity with the World Trade Organization's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). As a side effect, US submarine patents are not possible anymore, since the patent term now depends on the filing date, not the issue date, and further since the publication of patent applications now generally occurs 18 months after filing.

In practice, the determination of the term of a US patent involves further parameters, such as potential extension, i.e. the "patent term adjustment rule" since the American Inventors Protection Act (AIPA) was enacted on November 29, 1999. The patent term may also be reduced by any disclaimer (called a "terminal disclaimer") to the patent term.

The original patent term under the 1790 Patent Act was "not exceeding fourteen years." [1] The 1836 Patent Act (5 Stat. 117, 119, 5) provided (in addition to the fourteen year term) an extension "for the term of seven years from and after the expiration of the first term" in certain circumstances [2]. In 1861 the seven year extension was eliminated and the term changed to seventeen years (12 Stat. 246, 249, 16). The signing of the 1994 Uruguay Round Agreements Act [3] then changed the patent term from seventeen years from the date of issue to the current twenty years from the earliest filing date.

 

Remember a few years ago when freon was declared "unsafe for the ozone layer" and (in the USA anyway) we switched to using R-134a? Coincidently, DuPont's patent on freon was going to run out the next year...

 

You can make a boat that look exsactly the same as long as it's made out off your own drawings, but if you are using a method they have patent on you can come into alot off truble.

 

Can't say I didn't warn you