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Case Studies Heavy equipment, heavy protection
Heavy equipment, heavy protection
An Australian family business patents for success
Ellis Equipment located in Kingaroy, the heart of Queensland's cotton growing
region, has been a leader in cotton harvesting machinery for decades.
They knew their business so well, that when they became the distributors for
an American machine, they came up with modifications which made the machine
more responsive to Australian conditions.
'Basically, even though the crop is the same, the soil types are totally different,'
says David Pratt. 'Our changes were critical to whether or not this machine
would be appropriate for Australian cotton farmers.'
This could have been the end of it, but the Pratt family decided that these
changes were significant enough and the market important enough to warrant patent
protection. What they didn't do was shut out the American firm, instead offering
them joint ownership of the patent, eventually granted by the Patent Office
of IP Australia.
'To us it just wasn't on. The product on the whole belonged to the Americans.
Our modifications were important, but not an entirely new product, so we became
joint partners in the patent process,' says David.
According to their patent attorney not all of the modifications were eligible
for patent protection but did justify design registration with the Designs Office
of IP Australia. The patent protected the wholesale manufacturing of this machine
by any other firm, but the design registration was also critical to halting
a competing firm from manufacturing replacement parts. This sewed up the entire
product for Ellis Equipment.
Following on from this foray into patenting, David, who had also spent several
years involved in the construction industry, then invented SlideForm.
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