There's a a difference between 'first to file' and 'first to invent' in patents. Most (all?) territories use the former, but the US only changed in 2013. Not sure how that applies retrospectively. More detail in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_inv...
As I understand it matters against “prior art” defense. Basically if you patent someone else’s work, it invalidates the patent. But if you can prove that, you are the first to work on this, doesn’t really matter when you patented.
Patenting years later is basically giving right to people to use your patent, if you started implementing before the patent date.
Yes. If they released it publicly in 2007 they can't then go and patent it in 2008.
Re:Apple's petition against RED
by johnny-lee on Thursday August 22, 2019 @06:02PM
(#20772805)
The USA and certain other countries allow a grace period between disclosure of an invention and the patent application for that invention before that invention disclosure becomes prior art. For the USA, the grace period is 12 months, for other countries, it's 6 months.
If so, it would seem you can game the system by documenting your invention well, only filing for a patent years later.
Also, if that’s true, comparing when you made the invention to when others filed for a patent is unfair.
That should be a concern for RED, as a comment on https://nofilmschool.com/red-camera-apple-patent-challenge says:
”We were using a SI2K (Ari Presler camera) in August 2006... The first two shots of my reel were done with the first version of that camera, it was a sensor with a lens connected to a PC through Gigabit Ethernet...
https://vimeo.com/351939975”*