Mark Stadnyk Challenges a Sweeping Revision in Patent Law

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Monday, August 27, 2012

Mark Stadnyk Challenges a Sweeping Revision in Patent Law

By STEVE LOHR

In Silicon Valley, Apple just won big against Samsung in the patent lawsuit of the year, after trading claims and counterclaims of pilfered product ideas. Across the country, in a federal court in Florida, an inventor named Mark Stadnyk is waging a different kind of patent warfare — an ambitious and perhaps quixotic legal foray.

Mr. Stadnyk, who holds a patent on a motorcycle windshield, is suing the United States government, aiming to head off a patent law that he says will favor big companies and hurt lone inventors like himself.

Represented by a prominent Washington lawyer, Mr. Stadnyk filed a suit last month that challenges the constitutionality of legislation that Congress passed last fall, the America Invents Act. Mr. Stadnyk and his lawyer — along with some academics, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists — assert that the legislation is a triumph of corporate lobbying power over the founders’ wishes, and that it threatens America’s stature as the world’s leading innovator.

The present system, one of the nation’s oldest patent principles and called “first to invent,” relies on lab notebooks, e-mails and early prototypes to establish the date of invention. The impending law would overturn that by awarding patents to the inventors who are “first to file” with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Mr. Stadnyk, 48, a garage inventor who stumbled into the world of patents after he bought a powerful new motorcycle and wanted to avoid being battered by the wind when riding at 60 miles an hour, even with a windshield. He devised a system of brackets and gears to adjust the height and angle of the windshield and the gap between it and the motorcycle. With his system, he says, the rider feels a flutter of breeze instead of jolting winds and turbulence.

Mr. Stadnyk, who describes his invention style as “rough hacking with chunks of metal,” founded his company, MadStad Engineering, in 2006, and as sales picked up, he stopped working as a computer consultant to devote himself to the business.

Today, MadStad employs eight people, including Mr. Stadnyk and his wife, Patty. His adjustable windshield systems, priced from $100 to $320, are now used on dozens of makes and models of motorcycles, and are sold through dealers in Australia, Britain and Spain, as well as the United States. Yearly sales, he said, are more than $500,000 and growing briskly.

Mr. Stadnyk holds three patents, and he speaks of a patented idea as a uniquely human property right. “It came out of your mind,” he explained. “It’s not property you bought or inherited.”

Mr. Stadnyk became interested in the patent legislation as it proceeded. He says he studied the proposals and the law, read blogs and reached out to Washington lawyers and academics who raised the issue of its constitutionality. A grass-roots activist, he even made a couple of YouTube videos.

The shift to a first-to-file system, scheduled to take effect next March, is intended to simplify and streamline the current system, which can invite protracted litigation between competing inventors. The switch would also put the United States in harmony with patent offices in Europe, Japan and elsewhere, allowing them to share information and potentially ease the strain on overburdened patent examiners worldwide.

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