Bill Lawrence wrote on Nov 20
th, 2018 at 3:09pm:
Having done more patent searches than may have been good for my sanity, they can indeed be frustrating, grossly time consuming, and ultimately unsuccessful. But it has also been my experience, as BP notes, that many companies did sometimes stamp some variation of PATENT PENDING and even PATENTED on products simply as a hopeful deterrent against copying, knowing well that a rival would be severely tasked to find out if the application had been rejected, let alone even submitted.
Legally, an ap was
supposed to have been submitted to earn the "right" to display that mark, but as far as I know, the P.O. had no means of enforcement. If a patent that had already been granted was challenged by another party claiming to be the true inventor, the dispute was settled in court, not by the P.O.
Stevens marked Patent Pending on some of their scope tubes, but no patent was ever granted to them for the very good reason that no features of their scopes could support a claim of novelty. On the other hand, their detachable scope blocks
could justify that claim very well, I think, but there's no record of Stevens seeking patent protection for them.