According to Wilcox, he had spent £150,000 developing the technology, which also attracted a government grant of £100,000, but because of the weak laws and penalties surrounding patent protection, larger companies rode roughshod over his patents.

As a result, Wilcox has called for patent infringements to fall under criminal law and mirror the rules of copyright, a far cry from the current system, which simply forces the infringer to pay damages to the owner of the patent. This often adds up to little more than the licence fees that the patent holder would have earned – in effect, encouraging companies to take a chance and wilfully breach a patent.

The onus on protecting a patent falls on the patent holder, a situation that is very different from copyright law, which is policed by the state.

Contravision managing director Roland Hill currently has 26 patents in place or pending and, even with his 20 years of experience, he still finds the patenting process frustrating at best.

"When you own copyright, it is protected long after you pass away, so a recording artist’s children will still be receiving royalties in 50 years’ time," he says. "But my patent is only protected for 20 years. Sometimes it can take that long for a technology to truly come to fruition."

Compounding confusion
While Hill, who has sat on government patent committees, clearly sympathises with inventors, he says that cases like Wilcox’s are compounded by the fact that there is a lot of confusion surrounding patent law, and that filing is only the first step in bringing a patent to life.

He explains: "The thing a lot of people miss is that while a patent stops other people from making your invention, it doesn’t necessarily give you the right to make it. If somebody else proves that your patent infringes theirs, you must pay the costs.

"It is an expensive process, protecting a patent. It isn’t realistic to get into a litigation battle – nobody can afford that. The only time you get a litigation battle is when it involves two giants going up against each other. I compare patent litigation to the America’s Cup yacht race – it is a play-thing of the rich; the rest of us are in tiny dinghies just trying to get around the first buoy."

According to Quen Baum, managing director at finishing equipment manufacturer Morgana, even for a smaller manufacturer, protecting patents is "almost impossible".

He says: "Huge companies can afford to get everything protected, but the cost is phenomenal. You can’t get one patent and be covered; you must pay for it to be covered in every country you sell your product in.

"As well as patents being expensive, you also have to look and see if anybody is infringing you, which is difficult to do because you can only really do it by getting inside the rival machine, which is not as easy as it sounds. If you ring up a rival company and ask to have a look inside their machine, you are likely to wind up with a two-word answer."

It seems the one thing guaranteed with patents is that filing costs are just the beginning. Once you pay to patent your product, you face the anxious wait to find out if anybody copies it. If they do, the next stage is to respond, which of course involves expenditure on lawyers and courts.

"What I found surprising is that your patent can be challenged," says Baum. "In a way, it is like taking somebody’s money to survey a house, saying the house is fine, but then adding a disclaimer that if it falls down we can’t be held responsible."

 When a company or individual is accused of copying a patented product, as Baum has found out over time, two defences are commonly used. The first obvious one is to deny that it is a copy, but the second defence is to challenge the patent itself.

Baum continues: "They can trawl back through the history of patents in order to disprove it and come up with anything. You may end up with them saying your patent isn’t valid because of some invention from 1855.

"Your lawyer will probably not have gone back centuries to check something, so there’s always a risk."

While large national companies taking patents from individuals have proven a problem for Morgana, for individual inventors like Wilcox, the Western world is actually not the biggest challenge. Rather, the biggest issue for many manufacturers seems to be developing nations, where patents are either not enforceable locally or are even just plainly ignored.

Wilcox believes that, if the government put more protection on patents, the UK wouldn’t be in its current financial turmoil.

He told PrintWeek: "We don’t manufacturer any more, so what does the UK have? It has a lot of inventors – we have the most thriving group of small business inventors in the world – but, more and more, they are being put off because they come up with an idea and then its stolen by the big boys all over the world, and there’s nothing that we can do about it."

While there is little doubt that different companies face different threats, the consensus is that all too often patents are not worth the paper they have been printed on. So if the United Kingdom is to remain at the top of the innovation game, the government needs to act now and give the UK innovators the protection that they deserve at home and overseas.

• In the UK a copyright stays in place for 70 years after the piece has been written or produced; a patent lasts for 20 years and has to be renewed each year
• While a copyright infringement can lead to police action, including imprisonment such as a punishment, patent infringers are merely forced to pay damages, similar to costs they would have faced through licensing
• Michael Wilcox took to the Houses of Parliament in protest at consistently seeing his patents infringed
• He believes that the costs involved in protecting them are too much for a small business or independent inventor to bear, so large companies do not fear infringements
• The SME Innovation Alliance says many small companies are ending projects because of the cost of not only chasing a patent, but defending it further down the line
• Even if you have a patent in place, it only stops others making your invention; you’ve no right to make it and it could later emerge that your patent infringes on another

READER REACTION

Do you think that patent laws need to be toughened up?

Nigel Bond
Chief executive, Domino Printing Sciences
"I have great sympathy for Michael Wilcox, especially
following the effort he has put into his project. For generations, the success of this country has been built on entrepreneurial spirit, but it has become increasingly difficult for SMEs or individuals like Wilcox to get a foothold in product development.
UK patent laws need to be changed to help nationally and internationally. At the moment, budding entrepreneurs don’t have a chance when it comes to defending their inventions against the larger companies."

Jo Watkiss
Marketing director, Watkiss Automation
"The problem with the system is that you are constantly facing further costs. You pay to get the patent in the first place, then pay an annual charge to maintain it. If somebody does infringe you, you take them to court and this leads to even more cost. You end up asking yourself why you paid for it in the first place. If somebody infringes on a patent, they should most certainly be forced to pay damages and they shouldn’t be allowed to continue marketing that product. Stealing intellectual property is theft and should be punished accordingly."

John Hornby
Chief executive, The Lettershop Group
"The patent laws in this country do need to be tightened up to encourage people to innovate and create new products. Over the years, we have often deliberated over the idea of patenting our technology but in the instance of our hybrid personalisation press, much of that is already in the public domain. It can become a case of defending your intellectual property, which is problematic. I think smaller businesses need to keep their heads down when trying to develop a new product, but we all know it’s not that simple."

You can read Tec-ni-fold managing director Graham Harris' comment here