If I own the patent to A+B+C, and later A+B is granted a patent, can I still manufacture A+B+C
<p>If I manufacture <code>A+B+C</code>, then I would be infringing upon <code>A+B</code>, no?</p>

<p>What the discussion has missed is that how elements are interconnected and interrelated is itself an element. If A and B are things, some C must define their interrelationships.</p>
<p>Image a 4-wheel car exists and what everyone knows is that to be stable a car needs 4 wheels in a rectangular arrangement.</p>
<p>Someone invents a 3-wheel car by realizing stabilization can be achieved by only one rear wheel if it’s located between the front two.</p>
<p>The four wheel car had three wheels but it isn’t a 3-wheeled car. The claim for the 3 wheeled invention needs to not say a car having 3-wheels. That already exists. But a car balanced as a working 3-wheeled car could be claimed.</p>
<p>So A + B + C + D existed but someone figured out how to make a workable A + B + C and has a patentable invention. The seeming contradiction is solved by noting that the first case was really A,B,C,D and X where X defines the relationship between the first four elements. The new invention has A,B,C and Y. It is novel and not a subset of the prior art.</p>

<p>That depends a bit on how exactly the patents came about and are written</p>
<ol>
<li>If you have A+B+C, everyone can do just A+B without infringing</li>
<li>A+B is unlikely to be granted since it's included in A+B+C so there is prior art</li>
<li>Someone might be able to patent A+B+NOT_C where &quot;NOT_C&quot; is new the invention. That's still unlikely to get granted, but may happen in rare cases if NOT_C is really non-obvious and everyone has been doing +C since the dawn of time.</li>
<li>If that happens you can still keep manufacturing using A+B+C. You would not be able to do A+B without doing C as well.</li>
</ol>
<p>The most likely outcome here that everyone (including you) will just use A+B with no one owning a patent on it.</p>

<p>Assume that neither of A, B and C is patentable (because they don’t anything useful on their own), and combining them was not obvious which is why you could get a patent.</p>
<p>A and B together don’t work, at least not if combined in an obvious way, or if combined in the way you did if we left C out. So I can’t get a patent for A and B because it doesn’t work.</p>
<p>But I could get a patent for combining A and B in a new non-obvious way. Your invention is not affected because it doesn’t combine A and B that way. On the other hand, your invention is not prior art assuming A and B each were not patentable.</p>

patents