Model 9 · 5 min read
The Cost of Silence
An unenforced patent is not a worthless patent. It is an unaudited one.
Someone infringes your patent for 10 years. You never find out. Did your patent ever have value?
Robert Kearns spent a decade finding out the hard way. In 1963, driving in the rain, Kearns wondered why windshield wipers only had two speeds. He built a prototype in his basement that let wipers pause between swipes. He patented it, drove to Ford's headquarters and pitched it directly. Ford turned him down.
In 1969, Ford launched intermittent wipers on its Mercury line anyway. Chrysler, GM, Honda, Volvo, Mercedes and Rolls-Royce all followed with near identical systems within a few years. Kearns had no idea. For nearly a decade, his invention sat in millions of cars on the road, earning him nothing.
He did not sue Ford until 1978. Nine years of silent infringement had already passed. Under US patent law, you can only collect damages for infringement going back six years from the day you file suit. Damages before 1972 were knocked out entirely.
The Ford case alone took 12 more years. In 1990, a jury awarded him $5.1 million; Ford, facing appeal, paid $10.2 million instead. His separate case against Chrysler ended in 1992 with an $18.7 million verdict that grew to roughly $30 million with interest by 1995.
During those silent years, did the patent have value? Every accounting record from that decade would say no. But the value was never absent. It was sitting inside every wiper motor rolling off a production line in Detroit, uncollected and unmeasured, not non-existent.
If you own a portfolio you have not checked against the market in years, you are not sitting on zero value. You are sitting on a shrinking window to prove it existed at all.