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Public Notice and Announcement to all entrepreneurs, creative people, visitors and anyone having a go to build a better life in the UK.

DO NOT Invest Your Money In the United Kingdom If It Has Anything To Do With Innovation And Intellectual Property Rights.

The UK Patent Office is totally incompetent, the UK Government don’t have ANY interest in recognizing the true value of intellectual property and, even if you manage to get a patent and make any success of anything at all, you will have the whole lot ripped away from you by large corporations who can’t think of anything for themselves and so they go around stealing and defrauding people.

The UK Government doesn’t have ANY intention of enforcing your creative rights because Big Corp pays big taxes. You will be bankrupted and left for dead without ANY help from ANY Authority, despite your enormous contribution to the UK, the risk of your investment and the years of your life you will spend doing it.

The advertising about how you need to ‘start helping the Country’ since Brexit is for the sole benefit of Government AND NOT YOU. They demand you spend your lifetime’s savings investing in businesses and innovation and yet when it comes to the crunch they don’t have any interest WHATSOEVER in defending you. Take it from me; after four years of Court cases in the Highest Courts in the Country trying to defend my creative rights against Big Corp and their army of lawyers, the UK Government hasn’t done anything at all to step in. In fact they have acted as if this is none of their business. It’s appalling.

As the founder, inventor and entrepreneur behind Fencebrackets® and all of my other products, I’ve spent the last 17 years building this business up from literally nothing, except with my own hard graft and unrelenting backbreaking work, scrimping and saving every penny and making enormous sacrifices to get my products to market. I haven’t had any investment or any backing or any sponsorship, and it has taken over a decade to get my products to market, become established and become the market leading product. I’ve put almost every penny into this venture and haven’t yet recouped my continuous investment of the last 17 years.

Tens of thousands of people have used and enjoyed my products that have sold in millions and that have supported businesses all over the Country and as a reward, all I’ve had is large national and worldwide firms stealing and defrauding my creative rights and flooding the market with counterfeit products because they don’t want to pay for the use of intellectual property.

I’ve been left drowning in years of Court cases, spending thousands trying to defend myself on my own without ANY help or representation, and the Courts who are obviously paid by the UK Government, refuse to allow me to subpoena ANY evidence, demand ANY disclosure of documents or summon ANY witnesses that proves my allegations, which is a total abuse of procedure, highly prejudiced and a Human Rights Abuse under Article 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998 and Article 67 of the Treaty of Rome. Who has ever heard of a defendant not being allowed to subpoena ANY evidence that proves their case??

I have asked the Courts NINETEEN TIMES to be allowed to subpoena evidence and have been refused for reasons that are so lame, the only conclusion that can be drawn is blatantly obvious corruption. Two different Judges even told me that I don’t have enough evidence and yet refused me to subpoena ANY evidence. This is total corruption and Human Rights Abuse designed and carried out by the UK Government to prevent anyone at all enforcing intellectual property rights against large corporations, because in the UK, intellectual property is completely worthless and the Government despises individuals that make profit and control market share.

It has been proven in evidence that the perpetrators of the crimes against me have brought malicious prosecutions based on their own false statements, Witness Testimony that they know to be false and misleading, and barefaced lies and Perjury, which is a criminal offence. CONSIDERING THAT THIS HAS BEEN DONE BY A LARGE LONDON LAW FIRM, this is so serious that it undermines the Rule of Law in the United Kingdom. This is a national joke and a public disgrace, and yet the Courts have allowed this to carry on, year after year without conscience, deliberately running me around in circles to try to prevent the UK from being forced to recognize the value of intellectual property, by me winning.

These circumstances have led to almost total destruction of my business, ruined my intellectual property portfolio estimated to be worth in excess of £10m and up to £40m (A North American evaluation, not a small minded UK one), left me suffering severe defamation due to Bankruptcy Orders, Restraint Orders, Injunctions and Director Disqualifications that I’ve endured that never should have happened, as well as the total annihilation of all of my friendships, relationships and family life.

I have taken this dreadful state of affairs to almost every Government Department in the UK, including: the Serious Fraud Office, the Police, The Commissioner of Police, the Civil Courts, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Patent Office, HMRC, The Department for Trade Business Skills and the Solicitor’s Regulation Authority. Not a single one has had any interest in protecting my rights and business despite me having made an unfathomable contribution to the UK, and yet the UK Government enjoys the enormous revenues made from my work. That’s called theft.

This is a VERY small piece of the story. I will publish the full story when I’ve won and put the ugly people behind these atrocious crimes in jail, and they will be going to jail, because I’ve lost all interest in financial settlements.


My message is simple:

DO NOT INVEST YOUR MONEY IN THE UNITED KINGDOM
IF IT HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH INNOVATION, BUSINESS OR CREATIVE RIGHTS, BECAUSE YOU WILL LOSE IT.

Why on earth would anyone want to take a risk and invest anything at all, with this going on? I wish I had never done it myself.

At least after almost five years, there is now an active Police investigation although I’m not holding out any hope in this wretched Country.

Take your ideas and dreams to the USA because you don’t have any hope in the UK. If anyone thinks I’m wrong, be my guest and take the plunge.


PUBLIC WARNING: OUR PREVIOUSLY FAILED FENCE CLIPS!

Dear Retail Stockists and General Public: We would like to bring to your attention the failures of a fence clip product that we designed a few years ago and have design rights to and that looks like this:

We are posting this warning notice that:

1). We have intellectual property design rights to this product dating back to 2001 and we have not authorised its sale - it is not currently being marketed by us and is not to be sold or stocked in our unique display stands.

2). This product is flawed in its strength and design which is why we never commercially produced in mass in the first place. It also takes longer to install than ours and will fail if your panel is twisted in the wind. When fencebrackets® were originally invented by our founder, there were dozens of concepts and prototypes tested extensively over the course of three years and he found that this product will easily bend out of shape and break far quicker and easier than the fencebrackets® we do sell, and which everyone has come to know and love - we've now sold almost 2 million without a single complaint EVER!!

The product shown in the drawing above failed due to the thin metal it was produced in and its inferior design compared to our other fence clips will result in your fence falling down much quicker than you think! We do not want you to think that we are marketing our old failed products to you and we have not brought it to market although we did design it and we do not want anyone to think that it was our products that let you down. This product hasn't been further tested since around 2007.

We suggest you stick with our other Fencebrackets® and look out for Mr. Logoman on the label - you're not just paying for a lump of steel, you're paying for years of testing and development, branding and peace of mind, so 19p may look cheap now but what will be the cost of replacing people's fences for them?

Don't say we didn't warn you!!

Fencebrackets® The New & Only Way To Put Up Your Fence!™


United Kingdom, Killing Your Dreams - Your Patent Is Worthless' ISBN

1). Saint Gobain - Owner of Jewsons builders merchants in the UK, Ehitusa ABC in Europe and Favor AS in baltic states and Finland - intellectual property thieves.

I wrote to Jewsons and Saint Gobain for many years asking if they would take my products on and they didn't even have the decency to reply because all along they were stealing my work and hoped I wouldn't find out. I have all the letters I wrote to them and recorded delivery notes that will be published in my book.

Here is my product and theirs:

 
 

After finding out about this product which is sold all over Europe to install studwork, partitioning and fencing, making these firms tens of millions of pounds whilst they haven't paid me a single fucking penny, I wrote to all of these Companies informing them that they have stolen my work and defrauded me and I demanded payment. They don't care - they just fobbed me off with lame ridiculous excuses because they know I don't have the money to enforce my intellectual property, so, fuck you - I will crucify you in fiction and you'll be in in my new book that will sell all over the world, making people aware that your firm ruins people's lives and financially kills them. These thieves supply B&Q with sandpaper - next time you go to B&Q look for the Saint Gobain logo and buy another brand instead. Avoid Jewsons and their shitty customer service, go to B&Q or Wickes instead.

The thieves claimed that there was no resemblance to my products, they claimed they didn't sell fencing and then they claimed that they didn't sell the products in the UK and that they didn't infringe my patent. Their product didn't even exist before I invented it.

I ask you this:

If they claim that they didn't infringe my patent and that there is not the slightest resemblance to my product, then why isn't their product sold in the UK, one of the richest consumer economies in Europe where we use exactly the same building techniques and building materials?

Instead of saying to me: 'we love your products, here's a sign on bonus and a royalty and we're going to sell these all over the world and make us a fortune' they go around playing the corporate 'it's not the same, ours is different, we didn't know', it wasn't us' card.

It's called Fraud, Unjust Enrichment and Intellectual Property Theft. They should be serving prison sentences but in the UK it's ok to go around killing and defrauding people because these firms pay tax that keep losers on benefits but if you go and rob a bank or steal someone's wallet you can go straight to jail for a lot, lot, lot less than the share of the profits they owe me.

2). Betashite, FH Dumbass and Britannia Dodgy Fasteners:

Update on Betashite Patent Theft Case, July 2015:

Patent infringement is now proven in evidence. Coupled with the use of my name 'Richard Perry' on purchase orders to order the infringing goods and import them into the UK and then sell them without my permission, falsified design sheets and London law firms committing perjury and abusing process to bring civil proceedings to conceal criminal activity, Betashite and FH (As Thick As Shit Fencing) will find they are ordered to pay me the monies I rightfully deserve as well as compensation for the millions of pounds now lost in devalued intellectual property rights. Both the City of London Police intellectual property crime unit and Wiltshire Police have both said they believe it is theft under the Theft Act 1968 and the Lord Justice of Appeal has told me their actions amount to a charge of at least 'passing off and fraudulent misrepresentation', which is punishable by up to ten years in prison and unlimited fines. The case continues… Be careful who you're doing business with - they may not be around to pay you. I bet they won't steal my work again - Losers! I will shortly be copying and modifying every single one of Betashite's patents by two steps and launching my new range of metal fencing products - so the millions they spent will be completely worthless, and I will sell these patents to their biggest competitor for a pittance. I will publish some evidence shortly.







To be published as soon as I have chance to write it.

~ Richard Perry, Founder

A Matter In The Public Interest

In order for the reader to understand the seriousness and implications of the theft and fraud of intellectual property rights, first of all I need to explain the nature and purpose of intellectual property itself; what it is and why it is so valuable. This is because it has been brought to my attention through the incompetence of the Authorities that have been involved in this terrible situation that many people don’t even seem to know what intellectual property is, which is why the UK Authorities do not have any experience or capability to deal with it or, even have any interest in enforcement of IP rights.

Everything around us in the world that is man-made has been brought into life or reality by an idea. Ideas change the world. In relation to the present dialogue and in the context of a ‘product’ arena where a product that is derived from an idea is created for the purpose of financial gain, a simple idea can build an empire and create vast wealth. In today’s world, anyone from any background, race or gender can successfully have an idea and bring it to life regardless of one’s status or level of education, intellect or finances. Of course as the world knows this, many individuals and businesses fiercely compete to bring out the next new product or ‘big idea’ before their competitors, in order to gain a market advantage and generate wealth and profits through sales of their product. Due to the very existence of competition and due to the costs of bringing to life one’s ‘big idea’ in the first place, both people and businesses will generally try to obtain legal protection for their product and creative rights, said legal protection that will provide a short term monopoly in the marketplace. The creators use this short term monopoly to enter into markets and gain ground to establish their products and businesses for financial reward before big competition can come along and diminish the creators’ investment. Creators are rightfully given this monopoly in order to protect them and their investment, otherwise nobody would ever create anything and the human race would stand still or relapse!

Creative rights are otherwise known as intellectual property rights because an idea or ‘creation’ generally stems from one’s mind and intellect. Our creative rights are made tangible and are able to become physical ‘property’ by recording our ideas. This is done by writing our ideas down or by making drawings of them to present them in a way that is easily understood, so that the idea is birthed from the human mind into our physical world. An idea is invisible until recorded and/or executed in the form of a physical tangible product (I will stick to product references here because i’m not writing a dissertation on intellectual property or creation). An idea only becomes reality and tangible when birthed and recorded. As the centuries have gone by, the human race has developed a system known as the patent system which is effectively an archive of everyone’s ideas that are recorded and stored generally in a chronological order; by date and time, so that the creator or ‘inventor’ of the idea or ‘concept’ has an official way of claiming that they are the original creator or inventor of the idea or concept or that they ‘beat another to the post’ as it were. The inventor generally identifies what is unique about their idea and makes a set of statements that distinguish their idea or concept from what is already known and released to the world. This set of statements is generally called ‘claims’ and become ‘rights’ that are owned by the creator. Sticking to the context within a products arena, when an inventor creates something new as identified by the set of claims, he/she is given a certificate by the recorder of the official records which confers a set of rights or title for a set period of time otherwise known as patent rights or intellectual property rights. These rights are supposed to prevent anyone else from using the inventor’s idea to make a gain for themselves without the inventor’s permission and so effectively the inventor is given the aforesaid monopoly, by law. Without this legal protection there isn’t any deterrent to dissuade or prevent others from coming along and just taking the inventor’s idea and commercializing it for themselves, which would immediately annihilate the inventors idea and any investment made into bringing his/her idea to life. These investments are usually enormous.

The above of course is why undesirable people such as the firms involved in these ugly crimes come along and steal intellectual property, because they know that they will instantly gain on the inventor’s investment, and therefore don’t have to make any investment themselves or pay the inventor, and they are still able to make the gains they are not lawfully entitled to. This is because they have taken the idea from a point after heavy investment has been made by the inventor, so these costs are avoided by the thief. Very large corporations have endless financial resources compared to an individual and these resources enable them to instantly commercialize ideas and make vast gains for themselves whilst the inventor’s intellectual property suffers complete devaluation and becomes completely worthless as well as his/her investment. This type of corporate crime and irresponsibility is extremely serious; it wrecks people’s lives and contributes to a breakdown of civilized society. If large corporations are so obsessed with profits and take the view that stealing intellectual property rights is a fundamental part of corporate life, then big monstrous company pitted against big monstrous company is one thing and nobody really loses because they have endless amounts of money; whereas worldwide companies stealing and financially butchering little individuals and small start-up enterprises because they don’t want to enter into licence agreements in the proper way or can’t think of anything for themselves, is just pure evil and barbarism. Ultimately, whilst the big corporations make unlawful gains and keep people in jobs, the inventor is unable to create anything new, his/her life is lost and society loses the talent and progress. Usually the inventor’s goal or dream is to develop their ideas and create businesses that will become large corporations, and the individual’s outlook is a complete contrast to that of a giant and established corporation that just runs for the sake of running when perhaps it should have died out a long time ago to make room for new enterprises that will take the human race forwards. Ideas and intellectual property is far more valuable and lucrative than most professions. In fact intellectual property rights are one of the very few ways that any individual can make vast fortunes in a lawful way and within a short period of time. However, whilst this is true, due to the way the world has developed and with the abundance of ideas and products already realized, it is actually very difficult to acquire patent rights, and the process of doing so is very expensive and takes several years to complete. The United Kingdom’s own Government website states that only 5% of patents filed by individuals ever reach grant stage. Only five percent of tens of thousands of applications filed every year. Therefore whilst vast fortunes can be made, the likelihood of being able to come up with ideas that have any commercial potential or mileage is very small.

The patent application process is that the inventor drafts his patent specification and claims, pays for a search of the archived records and an examination of his/her application and then, if the concept is unique, has patent rights granted. This initial stage of bringing a product to market is in itself very expensive. Most individuals will require the help of patent attorneys and the average spend is £100,000 for this stage because once one has an idea there is some initial research and investigation required to determine whether or not there is any commercial potential and whether or not there is already a similar idea in existence. After one has been granted patent rights then there are the enormous costs of prototyping and development which, depending on the complexity of the product, can easily run into hundreds of thousands of pounds. After this, when a product has been developed to a market entry stage then there are the costs of starting up an enterprise, advertising, marketing, and all of the usual start-up costs, which again is a vast investment of time and money. After all of these investments, the inventor then has to actually be able to sell his/her product and be able to make a profit. Again, this is very risky and extremely difficult due to competition and the fact that sometimes people will just not buy the product, no matter how good it is. An example of this was when digital mobile phones superceded analogue phones. I remember it took several years for people to become convinced that digital technology was reliable and stable enough and generally better than analogue before people were willing to put away their analogue phones. This took years. When an inventor is granted a short term monopoly of only 20 years, ever second is critical in the value and life of the patent as the clock is ticking, and once started it cannot be stopped or rewound. As this clock ticks, one’s investment into his/her enterprise generally increases but the profits may increase, decrease or not materialize at all. So this is an extremely risky business which is why generally only large corporations can or will do it because they can afford to take the risk. This is also why individuals will often licence their ideas and patents to large corporations in return for a royalty, so that they don’t have the financial risk or their risk is minimized. I cannot emphasize enough how risky this undertaking is. Many people invest vast amounts of their own money and savings into their ideas in the hope that they will hit the jackpot and make the fortune. They will even go into large debts, re-mortgage their houses and beg and borrow from family and friends in order to obtain their patent rights and take their products to market. Then, even after they have done all of that and even if they have secured intellectual property rights and then successfully developed a product and sold a few, they may not have any business acumen and will still fail. If you take a minute to reflect on this, these are huge sums of money and to the average individual these are lifetime’s savings and investments and the risking of money that has taken decades to earn. This is why, when large corporations just come along and steal intellectual property rights, the effects upon the individual are truly devastating and can often never be weathered or overcome.

In the USA the authorities understand this situation very well and they take action to enforce infringement and fraud of people’s creative rights. The punishments of doing it are severe. This is why the USA is light years ahead of the UK in terms of innovation. If you want to make money in the UK, simply go around stealing and defrauding intellectual property rights because the UK Authorities don’t understand the importance of it or the value of it and have absolutely no interest in enforcing it.

Just to recap or further explain what intellectual property actually is. Intellectual property also consists of copyrights, designs, trademarks, formulas, compositions and sequences, but for the scope of this basic overall explanation I’m largely referring to patents. Intellectual property can simply be a piece of paper with a design drawn on it, stamped and dated, or it can be a song that someone has written or it can be a statement drafted on paper supported with drawings and a set of claims. These are creative rights and your Patent Office should endorse those rights. You will receive a certificate with a copy of the rights attached that sport a nice little ribbon and seal thus binding it all together. This is your intellectual property that is announced to the world and reflected in your product. So the actual physical tangible intellectual property itself could be just a few sheets of paper having very little value, but the value of the idea itself that is announced and contained within these few sheets of paper is enormous. Therefore to steal intellectual property or defraud intellectual property, the thief doesn’t have to physically get hold of your actual certificate at all. The thief simply finds the patent on the public records and then makes use of the know-how contained within it. The other and most common way of carrying out this crime is that the criminal will simply take your product and copy it or try to make tiny modifications to try to ‘get around’ your patent or so that these modifications give them a means to argue only a civil liability and not a criminal one, even though their intent is to deprive you of your idea. I believe that the people and firms going around doing this are conspiring to injure you and deprive you of your creative rights and this is where a change in the law is required immediately in order to stamp this out. Due to patent law, when someone does modify or design around a patent, their product has to be a modification of more than one step to bypass the patent. This means that the concept itself has to be modified, or the product has to be modified in a way that takes the concept itself further, otherwise the patent is still infringed. It is now my experience that the UK Government and Judiciary do very well understand how modifications to a product may make an actual product different to another product produced under the same patent, but they do not understand that the concept itself has to be moved on by one step and this is where the entire system is completely flawed. The US system is different to the UK.

How intellectual property is valued. There are several ways of doing this and there are various theories such as the plumber test that help one estimate a value of intellectual property. The simple ways are looking at a financial sum of money that has been made from the patent through a product, which is generally turnover or profit or a combination thereof. There is goodwill and a consideration of how the sales of the product and/or the patent portfolio itself has increased the recognition and customer loyalty etc. therefore increasing value. There is the method of estimating target audiences and their volume and what one could expect to sell into the market and what financial sums this would generate and so on and there is taking into account a patent’s past performance and likelihood of future successes, future licencing potential and so on. There are more ways than this but these are the basics of it. Hence, evaluations can have a range of values depending on the way the evaluator has made the estimation and what information has been taken into account but generally intellectual property has considerable value. For a proven product and established brand the value is enormous. In relation to my situation, I have a proven track record of producing market leading products that have sold in many millions of units and the defendants in the cases have made many millions of pounds out of my work whilst refusing to pay me a single penny or enter into any proper legal licencing agreement, despite me having offered them these opportunities. Instead they decided to break the law and defraud me. It is in fact more serious than this: the people involved actually carefully planned and plotted a conspiracy and allocated parts of the conspiracy or crimes to one another or effectively ‘divided the plot’ amongst themselves and carefully executed it, then went to enormous lengths to cover it up, as is proven in evidence.

It is my belief that intellectual property should be the most regulated and heavily protected commodity in the world because most of the world revolves around it: industries are created and thrive upon it, jobs are created, people are happy and fulfilled and it is a very heavily interwoven part in the fabric of society. Without ideas and progress the human race freezes. Even simple ideas such as a plastic Christmas tree have brought an abundance of joy to the world.

It just so happens that I have been gifted with an innate talent for innovation and creation and I believe I have been put in this world to create products that will build big business and enterprise and create jobs and ultimately make the world a better place. This was my goal when I started off with my first fence bracket patent GB2390104. The way my life has gone is that I grew up around the construction industry and throughout my childhood and teenage years I came to recognize that I wasn’t just an inquisitive child; I actually had a talent for invention and innovation. Over the last 25 years I have honed this talent and skill and developed it and I have been able to produce market leading products that have sold in many millions spanning many countries. It is just the way it is and the gift I have been given. I have tuned my skill to become very diligent at what products I invent and in deciding what to take to market and I have found my own formula for this success which is a trade secret. My products have outsold my competitors by 200/300-1 where stocked and I achieved the goal of supplying national blue chip retailers with my products which is a testament to what I have accomplished - without any finance, any backing, any funding or any support. I’ve literally done this all on my own using my own money generated from decades of back breaking work coupled with my unique talent. I don’t owe anything to anyone and I’m proud of what I’ve achieved. Tens of thousands of people have used and benefitted from my products and talent and, large revenues as well as worldwide recognition has been generated for the United Kingdom. My products have supported businesses up and down the country. The firms involved in these crimes against me have recognized my great talent and witnessed my huge success and out of pure envy and greed have just come along and taken my ideas from a ‘developed stage’ and then modified them or copied them and sold their versions of my ideas worldwide, thus allowing them to make instant profit and thereby avoiding all of the immense start up and development costs, marketing costs, investment costs and all the time of my life it took to get my products to the developed stage in the first place.

However, regardless of whether or not my intellectual property has been proven to be infringed (cases still in progress as at 2017), the conspiracy and plot to deprive me of my ideas and creative rights is the very crime itself. That they have infringed my intellectual property and unlawfully used my own name to do it further proves the intent to commit the crime. I have a wealth of evidence that proves an unlawful intent to cause me serious harm.

This matter is of utmost importance to the general public because it is well known on a worldwide basis that intellectual property in the United Kingdom is completely worthless and there are many creative people and up and coming entrepreneurs that have invested their lifetime’s savings into their businesses and creative works who have an underlying expectation that those works and their vast investments will be protected by the UK Government.

When an inventor or creative person has their ‘big idea’ known as the ‘eureka moment’ and decides to jump in and make those investments, they expect their creative rights to be strongly protected, especially after having paid the UK Government thousands of pounds to protect them. Often in most cases the fees for intellectual property alone is tens to hundreds of thousands of pounds aside from other start up and development costs, and we don’t expect to hand over those lifetime’s savings to a totally incompetent and negligent UK Government who don’t have any interest at all in enforcing people’s creative rights, despite having been paid for them. The UK Government doesn’t have any interest in protecting the individual from powerful worldwide and national firms that go around defrauding individuals and stealing their work in the name of big profits. This is because the UK Government benefits from this corporate law breaking by gleaning vast tax revenues from the sales of counterfeit goods and goods that infringe people’s creative rights. They allow it to continue and do absolutely nothing to prevent or punish those responsible, whilst the inventor, creative person or up and coming entrepreneur is left with their work stolen, their businesses ruined and being left having to suffer complete destruction of their working and family lives. This is abominable behaviour and someone has to do something about it. This mindlessness slaughters the spirit of innovation in the United Kingdom and wipes out the talent in our country, leaving fewer and fewer people willing to have a go themselves - people and businesses that are the backbone and future of the UK economy.

The firms involved have, without any hesitation, taken advantage of this failed, flawed, and broken system and have bulldozed it by using their gigantic corporate might and resources to concoct a menacing and evil plan to injure me and defraud me of my lifetime’s work and creative rights, where I have suffered barbaric irreparable consequences. They have done this knowing that they are unlikely to get caught and therefore continue to do it anyway over a period of at least twelve years. These corporations have abused their corporate and social responsibility regardless of the consequences to their victims - in this instance I am the victim. My business and intellectual property has generated millions of pounds for the UK Government and my products have supported almost 1000 businesses in the UK and several other countries worldwide. Having been a victim of this corporate butchery I know exactly what I’m talking about. It is not big businesses that are the future of the economy and the country; it is the everyday little businesses like mine that people start up with a view to building their dreams. These are the businesses that kept the country going in times of war or recession; not the likes of the defendants who have not started their businesses themselves and just inherited daddy’s money. They have either sponged off of daddy’s decades of hard work or they are just mere employees who have gone about furthering their careers and big salaries by defrauding me of my lifetime’s work whilst hiding behind corporate fronts to further their own careers. The defendants have not only cheated me but they have also cheated the public and public revenues and do everything they can to take profits offshore without reinvesting it into the economy they are stealing it from.

My plan was to build an empire which I had started doing. My plan was to create hundreds of products that would make people happy all over the world. My plan and business and products have already generated large tax revenues and my talent is a gift to the UK economy, not a gift that is automatically enslaved to the UK Government as they mistakenly believe. The last I heard, slavery was abolished. The UK Government do not own or have rights to my creative human mind. I don’t have a problem paying the taxes because it would be invested back into the economy for the people that have bought my products in the first place. The defendants’ plan was to use highly paid accountants to reduce their taxable profits by as much as they can and then take profits off-shore that would eventually end up in the pockets of a few rich individuals at the top, so that everyone else loses out. This is all because they’ve run out of ideas and can’t think of anything for themselves and refuse to enter into any licencing agreements in the proper lawful way. We do not need people like this and their abusive community breaking behaviour in our society.

Failings of the United Kingdom Patent Office.

The word profit in the United Kingdom isn’t just a dirty word; the word ‘Profit’ stinks and makes people feel sick and so English people try to keep profit quiet or play it down. This gives rise to firms coming along who are willing to do anything they can to rob profits from people so that they can take the profit abroad or offshore where it doesn’t go back into the UK Economy, effectively cheating public revenues.

Since the Brexit vote, the Government is heavily advertising the fact that the Country needs to support innovation and entrepreneurs, to establish the future of the nation. They don’t tell you that if you invest your lifetime and hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment into your ideas to produce something and try to build a business, the Government will condone and quietly support large worldwide corporations who come along and steal and defraud you of your investments and talent and the lame civil courts will do everything they can to ridicule you and support the big firms because they pay more taxes. This is corruption.

The reader will understand by now that it is of no surprise that I do not have anything positive to say about the attitude of the UK Government towards innovation or the Patent Office, AT ALL. I have been dealing with Patent Offices all over the world for the last 15 years and the United Kingdom Patent Office is without doubt the very worst. The bottom line is that it needs to be closed down for few months, an abrupt halt or freeze should be put on everyone’s applications and the entire staff need to be completely retrained. All the way back to square one. The Patent Office is in such a disastrous state of affairs that it begs the question: is anyone’s patent even valid?

As far as the United Kingdom Patent Office goes, there isn’t any polite or academic way of putting across how appalling their service is. I excuse my language here, but the Patent Office just make fuck up, after fuck up, after fuck up, on a daily basis.

Most of the staff really don’t have any idea of what they’re doing, they don’t understand the very system that they are implementing and they don’t have any interest at all in protecting individuals and their creative rights. The sad part about it is that they literally just don’t care! They really don’t give a toss about anyone’s applications as long as they can continually take their salaries and use the Office as a career stepping stone. The Office just takes people’s money to create jobs for the boys who have a job to turn up to the following day. I would say that is unlawful. It is also of no surprise that things have gone the way they have, when all of this mess is taken into consideration and, this entire situation is really an atrocity for every creative individual having a go and making a contribution to the UK. Here are a few examples of the problems that I’ve had to deal with on a regular basis:

⬤ The Patent Office takes 6-7 years to grant a patent. This is idiotic. Absolutely idiotic. In 6-7 years it is most likely one’s market has gone and the heavy investment is a complete waste of time.

⬤ The Office admits it has trouble recruiting staff that have any interest in Intellectual Property.

⬤ Staff don’t know the answers to many simple questions and constantly make horrendous clerical errors. At one time I phoned the office to ask about extending a search application by an extra month. I knew I had to use a form 52 because I had done it before but just wanted to confirm. I spoke to a member of staff who is usually on the ball but it wasn’t her department so she transferred me to ‘an expert in the examinations department’. I put my question to the ‘expert’ and he had no idea. He told me ‘please stay on the phone whilst I ‘Google it’ for you’. This conduct is appalling – an examiner who doesn’t even know what form to use to extend a time period. This is one of the simplest parts of the patent process.

⬤ Regular miscalculations about fees, timelines, filing dates and general misinformation. These errors cause great losses of time and money.

⬤ Horrendous misadvice on many many aspects of the patent process.

⬤ No two examiners are the same – they don’t understand the system or they interpret the process in a way that their individual minds can understand, which leads to all different ideas of whether an application is patentable or not. This again is ludicrous. The staff should be consistent in every part of the process and they should all be trained in the same way and they should all be implementing the system in the same way. An example is divisional applications. The idea behind a divisional in the UK is that the applicant may possibly be able to get two ideas patented out of one parent application. I was doing this a lot because it seemed to be the best option in a very bad system of widening my legal protection. One year I was told that a divisional must be completely different to its parent application although it should be broadly based around the same concept and that it was difficult to obtain a divisional because everything was obvious to a skilled workman putting the know how in the patent to use. I argued this crazy system with one examiner and eventually had a divisional granted. Then several years later I was told by another examiner during another divisional application that the Office had to give permission to apply for a divisional and that the application had to be a precise and accurate EXACT copy of the original application and I could only change the claims but nothing else. These two opinions are in complete contrast of one another. How on earth does anyone know what is valid and what isn’t?All one can be sure of is that at least they have a patent certificate – validity and enforceability? Forget it.

⬤ Advising me to let patents lapse instead of paying late renewal fees led to a massive loss of market protection and investment.

⬤ Frequent clerical errors such as getting my name and dates wrong on correspondence.

⬤ At one time the Patent Office wrote to me asking me if they could use my work to train their staff. I said that would be fine provided that if they published anything and sold it, then I wanted a royalty. Their reply was ‘we don’t pay for the use of intellectual property’ !! This symbolizes the United Kingdom’s attitude towards intellectual property rights - they just think those rights are completely worthless and yet demand payment for their service to grant and supposedly protect people’s creative ideas yet don’t want to pay for those rights themselves.

⬤ One examiner had made a complete screw up on a series of patents for my Plantladders™ garden products and told me to abandon earlier applications. I did as she suggested and then she examined the subsequent application and told me that that particular feature in question would be protected by the first patent but then told me I had abandoned it!! This Office’s total incompetence is God damned unbelievable. The examiner then adamantly denied that she told me to abandon the application despite myself having it in her own words in correspondence she sent to me. I then got into another row with the Office over yet another total screw up and loss of rights due to their total incompetence.

⬤ In 2003 and in relation to my first patent GB2390104 the Patent Office told me the only way to secure foreign rights was to go through their PCT department who handled the applications directly. I made this application and then ran out of money and couldn’t continue it. It turned out years later that this was an outright lie and that I could apply to each individual country from within the UK or even apply through the European Patent Office which is £1500 cheaper. In other words the UK Patent Office was trying to take money from applicants for a service that they knew was available and easy to access and £1500 cheaper, just to generate income and jobs for the boys and made false statements to deter me from obtaining the same service that was cheaper elsewhere. This has had devastating effects on my patent rights and I will be taking this up with the Patent Office once this case has concluded because that is unlawful.

⬤ On another occasion I filed two trademark applications and paid for the Patent Office’s ‘quick start’ which involved paying part of the fee to see if the proposed mark has a chance of being registered. After some correspondence, the Office refused to check my proposed mark against the categories I had specified in my application and told me ‘you can’t possibly want your mark in all those categories’. I told the examiner that I had paid the fee for the number of categories and pointed out to him that how did he possibly know what I would use my mark for in the future after I had expanded into different areas in the market? I asked that if and when the time came that I need my mark in the categories I had applied for but which he refused to examine, would he be willing to pay the duplicated costs out of his own money? He refused all subsequent correspondence and didn’t examine the marks. He refused to process my application. The Patent Office refused to refund my money on either of the two marks even though only one was ever examined. That is called theft. I made a complaint to the Chief Executive’s office and they refused to return my money even though they didn’t provide the service and even though I had sent proof of the emails and communications between myself and the examiner. The root cause of it was because their flawed online trademark system couldn’t cope with a lengthy application which would have cost the office hundreds of thousands to resolve and fix by implementing a system that doesn’t run out of memory after you’ve selected more than 50 categories. For the reader, most very large worldwide companies would register their marks in hundreds of categories depending on their products and markets.

⬤ On another occasion I was told that I didn’t need to specify every individual category – I only needed to specify the classification heading and that the Office would assume I wanted to cover every category within the classification. I did this and followed their instructions and then when it came to examination I was told this particular application wasn’t valid because someone else had a similar mark and had specified particular categories which they had told me not to do. It really is just screw up after screw up.

⬤ On one patent application I tried introducing the Patent Office to a new way of drafting claims that clearly identifies and separates independent claims and dependent claims, similar to the US system (I had had a dispute with the Office about the fact that they fail to recognize independent claims, which restricts and devalues every patent every drafted using the UK system). My proposed new way of drafting claims would have bolstered up the entire patent system and made patents tighter and more valuable. The main advantage of the system I proposed was that several executions of the same idea could be covered by one patent rather than people having to file divisional patents and dozens of other patents at phenomenal cost. I filed this system in one of my Plantladders® patents and the examiner went along with it until at some point she must have had her boss over-rule her as she suddenly came back and said “the Patent Office definitely recognizes independent claims as long as they all depend on claim 1” !!! What a joke! She is saying that they don’t recognize independent claims at all. In hindsight and several years later I now realise that the Patent Office will never ever accept such a system because it would produce stronger patents, the Patent Office would lose money because they wouldn’t have as many applications to process and the entire legal system only accepts a single claim in claim 1 of every patent regardless of how many independent claims you cite in your claims. Basically, the UK Patent System is a complete failure. The problem is that the UK patent laws have become so established based on this flawed system that it would be more or less impossible or at least very difficult to overhaul and change, which is why the old system stays as it is and is also the reason why intellectual property in the United Kingdom is completely worthless - because it is impossible to enforce it in the civil courts.

⬤ On another occasion I needed to file documents with the US Office that claimed a UK priority. I drove to the Office in Newport to submit a form to request a copy of an application as granted. I paid £20 for this and actually spoke to someone who told me what to do and which form to use. I then had to wait 3 weeks for this file to come back and then to my dismay and disappointment the idiot processing the request sent me a copy of the file as originally filed and not as granted which is exactly what I didn’t want. I then had to wait another week for the correct file and incurred hundreds of pounds in costs with the US office for the delays.

⬤ It’s ‘dress down day’ on a Friday at the Patent Office. This means staff don’t have to wear formal business attire; they just wear whatever they like to impress their colleagues. Along with it, the staff dress themselves in casual attitudes and don’t pay any attention to what they’re doing. They are effectively being paid for working only four out of five days because the casual dress day is the casual attitude day.

I mean, come on, this surely cannot go on. There is an endless list of severe problems and errors that just should not be happening on a regular daily basis, if at all. The points above are not anywhere near a comprehensive list of all the problems I’ve had with that Office. There is an entire catalogue of errors.

Until this dreadful mess is resolved by the UK Government, my advice to anyone reading this is:
DO NOT INVEST YOUR MONEY IN THE UNITED KINGDOM IF IT HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, INNOVATION OR CREATIVE RIGHTS. YOU WILL LOSE YOUR MONEY AND ALL THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE DOING IT AND, YOU WILL END UP BEING SHAFTED BY THE UK.

Lets hope that the United Kingdom is going to wake up and put this terrible attitude towards IP in the past.



 
       
 
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