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Josh Malone invented the number one selling outdoor toy Bunch O Balloons, a hose attachment that allows kids to fill up 100 water balloons in under a minute. Shortly after launching his invention and raising close to $1M from 21,000 backers on Kickstarter, a knock-off called Balloon Bonanza was featured in a TV commercial from the “As Seen on TV” company, Telebrands. Emails obtained in court proceedings years after the fact revealed a deliberate scheme – “[t]his is only the first proto so
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assume this will have 37 filler rods and balloons (or more or less) like theirs and work exactly like the original ‘Bunch of Balloons.’” More Telebrands knockoffs and a series of injunctions and court appearances followed over the next few years. Telebrands proved itself to be a world class patent infringer.
made a mistake”, says Malone. “My patent says that when the balloons are substantially filled with water, they fall off and automatically seal. They paid an MIT professor to testify that no one knows when a balloon is ‘substantially filled with water’. The federal judge and the appeals court found their argument absurd and ruled in my favor”.
However, the Telebrands attorneys then brought the case back to the patent office and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. They told the PTAB the same laughable story; Nobody can understand when a balloon is “substantially filled with water”. On the basis of that argument, the PTAB agreed my patent was flawed. The infringing party won and my patent was invalidated.”
“PTAB takes an approved patent that you and your investors have risked everything on, then pulls the rug out from under you by invalidating that patent, so the infringer doesn’t have to pay for their misdeeds. It’s a travesty and something that I am working hard as a volunteer with US Inventor to remedy,” says Malone.
“For 200 years America had the best patent system in the world, and we benefited from that for a long time. Now we must acknowledge that we don’t have that anymore. If we want it back, we’ll have to go get it.”
hace 2 meses
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