Submarine patent
A submarine patent is colloquially a patent that is rather unknown at the beginning and is not defended by the patent owner. In this phase the patented process (possibly even by the patent holder) is integrated into a standard . Once the standard has prevailed, the patent proprietor asserts its claims from the patent ambush , assuming that it would be more expensive for those affected to replace the standard than to pay the royalties.
In practice, however, there are limits to this nowadays, since (due to the negative experience with submarine patents) participants in standardization committees now usually have to contractually commit themselves to announce their relevant patent applications and patents. To do this, however, the patent holders must be members of the standardization bodies. Patent applications are also automatically published 18 months after registration, so that they can be found during a patent search in a patent database (e.g. in the publicly accessible Espacenet ). Only in the USA could a patent application be kept alive for years or even decades unpublished until a few years ago.
example
CompuServe and Unisys are accused of using this tactic with the LZW algorithm , which is used in the GIF format. (The patents on the LZW algorithm of these companies have now expired. Also another patent, which was granted to the IBM company due to an error by the US patent office , but was probably invalid from the start because of the previously granted Unisys patent , has since gone out. The LZW algorithm is now freely available.)