Purchasing the patent

Question

In reference to the patent: US20080289082

Is there anyway I can contact the inventor and purchase this patent from them? If so how can I get in contact with him? Thank you!

Answer 1

The cited document is an application, not yet a patent. It may never become a patent. As such it doesn't yet protect anything. Normally to inquire about purchasing a patent you would want to contact the assignee rather than the inventor. In this case, both the assignee and the inventor are the same person: Marvin Harris.

The best way to determine the current status of this application is the US Public Pair site. Go to that site, get past the captcha and enter 20080289082 as the publication number. You will see several tabs including "Application Data", "Assignments" and "Address and Attorney/Agent". From the Application Data tab, I find that the application status is "Abandoned -- Failure to Respond to an Office Action". This suggests the application is dead and won't become a patent. It may be possible to resurrect the application, I'm not sure. There is a lot of information on the Public Pair site so you may want to review the correspondence between the patent office and the inventor to discover the reason for abandonment. It may be because of some other prior art.

In any case, Marvin Harris which, unfortunately, is a pretty common name, is listed as residing in Chicago, IL. The "Address and Attorney/Agent" tab generally gives an address of patent attorney which can be useful for tracking down the assignee or inventor, but the Public Pair was being balky when I was check this for you so perhaps you can try yourself.