The patent lawsuit against the Southfield suspenders company didn't hold up....

After the men's accessories Sal Herman makes were discovered marked with expired patent numbers, Holdup Suspender was sued in September and threatened with a maximum $500 fine per pair, potentially costing him millions of dollars.

The case was dismissed in the U.S. District Court in March in Detroit after the plaintiff, Akron-based Unique Product Solutions, saw a similar case dismissed in federal court in Cleveland. The judge there concluded that the False Marking Statute was unconstitutional, because it gives criminal law-enforcement power to private entities without any U.S. Department of Justice control.

According to recent interpretations of patent law, people who find an item emblazoned with an out-of-date patent number can sue -- even if they're not directly involved, like a competitor -- and be awarded 50% of the fine collected, which is as much as $500 for each incorrectly marked item.

"They're trying to get money they don't deserve," Herman's lawyer John Artz said. "Sal Herman had no intent to deceive. UPS didn't really prove (it). They just wanted to get a fast settlement to get some money, but Sal was not going to cave in to this shakedown, as he called it."

Attorneys for Unique Product Solutions could not be reached for comment.

Herman said the whole saga cost him $50,000 in legal fees, plus $30,000 to grind the old patent number off each suspender clip.

"I was not victorious in a sense, because it cost me $80,000," said Herman, who has four employees in his 6,000-square-foot warehouse-office space. "My wife calls it extortion and I just call it injustice. It just wasn't right, not the American way of legal action."

Patent number 4,901,408 -- for a suspender clip that includes a small pin to better grasp the pants fabric -- expired in June 2008, 20 years after he applied for it. In 2010, he got a new patent for an updated pin suspender clip, number D614946 and other patents on his new Gripper Clasp (plastic suspender buckle).

The up-to-$500-per-item windfall was enough to inspire a flood of lawsuits.

"Lots of people started bringing these actions. It's caused a lot of concern, because people were concerned about their exposure," explained Jake Grove, a patent attorney in Honigman Miller's Bloomfield Hills office. "From a policy standpoint, do we want all of these lawsuits? There were at least 950 similar false patent marking cases filed in federal district courts since Jan 2010."

Additional background on this great news for small business USA manufacturing firms like Holdup Suspender Co... Judge Finds False Patent Marking Provision Unconstitutional :-)