I'm not being disagreeable at all. I just wanted to explain this side of things bc its a side of things we deal with regularly.Well, patented stuff doesn't automatically mean it's trademarked. To have the little ® beside the name of the product it has to be trademarked with the US trademark office. Here's the patent you're talking about:
But, I get what you're saying. But you could still buy it in bulk and sell it, just not make any claims about it. I see tons of supplement companies that do that. They just expect consumers to know what it's for.
Btw, interestingly enough, the patent specifically says "Creatine is co-administered orally to increase the muscle-building and strength effect." So, if you wanted to go down that road, you could sell it without creatine and then say you're not in violation of the patent because there's no creatine in it. That is, if you have enough fees for lawyers.
Trademarked wouldn't mean the ingredient itself, it would be their name for it. For example, the trademark would be on a branded ingredient name like Mediator, or ActiGin, AstraGin, etc.
A patent would either be on the ingredient itself (extremely hard to get), specialty constituents, a specific standardization process, or on specific uses for an ingredient. In the case Mediator, it would cover any muscle building or strength claims. So if you were to do a generic one, you couldn't make any claims on it, so you basically couldn't market your product.
The sell it in bulk and not make claims may work for more well known ingredients but I don't think enough people know about Phosphatidic Acid to work with this. And plus, the price of the generic material is not a lot cheaper. Don't get me wrong, its cheaper, not enough cheaper to make it worth not being able to market your product. Plus, a lot of the generic material is only 20% standardization rather than 50%.
The one patent is in conjunction with creatine but the other is without creatine. So they now have it covered both ways.
I hope all that makes sense.