intellectual-property patents
Why can multiple companies make wind turbines? Why don&#39;t they run into patent violations?
<p>I am curious to know that how it can be that so many companies can build wind turbines.</p>
<p>Did these companies buy the patent from the inventor of wind turbine? Or is this technology not patentable? Or did no one bother to patent this technology?</p>
<p>Suppose, hypothetically, that I am the inventor of the wind turbine. How can I protect my idea to prevent it from being duplicated?</p>

<p>Of course windmills/turbines in general are not new and one would not need a license or permission to make and sell a &quot;generic&quot; wind turbine. But there are new types of wind mills invented and patented all the time. Examples are <a href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US7821148B2" rel="nofollow noreferrer">US7821148B2 Wind turbine</a> and <a href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US8441138B2" rel="nofollow noreferrer">US8441138B2 Wind turbine</a>.</p>
<p>Patents are complicated and an inventor of a new type of windmill might need to license other people's patents that are broader in order to be able to make their new invention.</p>
<p>Most windmill inventions are to improvements in components. It is a very rich field. As a small example, I helped a client get a patent on a device that is attached inside a windmill tower that prevents maintenance workers hitting their heads on part of the structure as they climb up.</p>
<p>The second part of your question was how you can protect an invention you might make. Technology can be protected by patents both design and utility and some things might be able to be kept trade secrets (but not both for the same thing).</p>

<p>There can be no patent on the idea of wind wheels, as they are medieval &quot;prior art&quot;. Likewise, many generator patents are no longer applicable, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_generator#Faraday_disk_generator" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the first were invented back in 1831 by Faraday</a>. Recombining a windwheel with a dynamo is almost as old - so the idea and basic setup of even the worst efficient wind turbines is not patentable: You can not patent anything that is prior art.</p>
<p>Many types of Wind turbines are prior art and had their patents - if they existed - expired for at times decades. As a result, those plans are open to anyone to use.</p>
<p>What is patentable are parts or designs that make them more efficient or cheaper to make, more sturdy or such, and there are tons of parts in that category.</p>
<p>So in the end we got many companies that make either patent-free windmills or have their own patents or licensed the patents of others. But there can't be a monopoly on windmills anymore since there are so many prior-art designs.</p>
