While the above poster is correct for the most part. I have seen cases where patents were invalidated because there were no plans for commercial use(in some venues like the ITC) and the patents were just sitting around doing nothing. Also just filing a patent does not guarantee that the patent is truly valid even though the patents are prosecuted after they are filed(a process I am not familiar with I have only seen this mentioned when a patent is challenged after it is approved) there are many htings that can break a patent afterwords stuff like double patenting pre existing prior art and so forth. It does however add a layer of protection to the inventions of a company and so it is a common practice if they ever decide to use it.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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While the above poster is correct for the most part. I have seen cases where patents were invalidated because there were no plans for commercial use(in some venues like the ITC) and the patents were just sitting around doing nothing. Also just filing a patent does not guarantee that the patent is truly valid even though the patents are prosecuted after they are filed(a process I am not familiar with I have only seen this mentioned when a patent is challenged after it is approved) there are many htings that can break a patent afterwords stuff like double patenting pre existing prior art and so forth. It does however add a layer of protection to the inventions of a company and so it is a common practice if they ever decide to use it.