How hard is it to invalidate a patent?

The common fallacy that may be the impetus of your question is that patents are easy to get. They’re not—I’ve seen inventors spend a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars getting one. So to invalidate someone’s life’s work will take you more than a casual search on Google. :)

What you see in the other answers is that it’s generally very difficult to invalidate a patent, and often very expensive, precisely because you basically have to re-do everything they spent years and lots of money doing to get the patent (which is very difficult) and then find a critical error or fraud in that process. And odds are, they’re geniuses, which is why they got the patent. They are probably students who have based their theses on them, large companies who are their customers and would lose umpteen millions if it were overturned, famous professors who have co-authored papers with them—not to mention a growing list of lawyers who have spent a decade learning the technologies well enough to help them get the patent.

The public relations arms of the serial infringers will tell you that patents are often sketchy and all you need to do if an inventor asks you to get a license to use his invention is to threaten to ‘turn him in’ for asking, threaten to ‘invalidate his patent.’ No, as others have said, patents are presumed valid because they normally are. All those questions of obviousness and stuff already have a very long paper-trail. And the question the original patent examiner researches isn’t whether it’s obvious to normal people, it’s whether it’s obvious to other geniuses, those ‘skilled in the art’ as it were.

It’s not that it doesn’t happen. It’s that it’s a difficult long expensive uphill battle, and it’s that the media, when they say otherwise, are mostly reporting paid PR pieces from large and beloved corporate defendants.

As with all questions of fact, you academically must kill your darlings to find the truth.

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