Steven D'Aprano wrote:
He can say whatever he likes, but until infringement is either proven in court or admitted
I'm with you on that count.
When I considered patenting my own ideas, I discovered that you could patent just about anything that had not been patented before. It's only when it comes to enforcing the patent in court that you run up against several other restrictions.
One such restriction is that your patent can't just be some reservation of use of existing technology for some purpose that you thought up, like "I patent the idea of selling software over the internet" (US Patent 4,528,643, issued July 9, 1985, for Freeny, bought by E-Data Corp, who tried to make money out of it, I don't know what happened to that in the end, but I seem to remember it going nowhere). Your patent must specify some process or technology that clearly took some effort to figure out. You can't simply jump to be the first person to patent something obvious. Furthermore, if it turns out that somebody else was already doing what you suggested, then your patent is invalid.
For sure: the rules are vague, and come down to a judgment call in court.
Yours, Kevan