Inventor of Optical Storage Gets Little Reward

Thu Anon Coward writes "This poor guy invented optical storage (CDs, DVDs) and never made a dime. Another case of an idea before its time and cheating a man of his due. To quote the article, 'Consumers will spend billions this holiday season on CDs, DVDs and machines to record and play the ubiquitous silver discs. But the inventor of the underlying technology won't make a cent. Today, Russell does consulting from a lab in the basement of his Bellevue home to keep in the game and supplement a modest pension from Battelle.'"

Comments

a penny for your CD?

[emptybody]

send him a penny for each CD you have.
its more than the RIAA would give him.

Re:a penny for your CD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please mod parent up to +5 Ballsy.

Re:a penny for your CD?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he's just ahead of his time using the open source model. Why should a great contribution be rewarded financially when you can always hand it off to big business and have them reap the profits?

Re:a penny for your CD?

[dankjones]

Better yet, send him a penny for every album you download.

Don't give the RIAA any $$$.

Uhh consulting while on a pension?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh consulting while on a pension?... does anyone else see a problem with this?

Re:Uhh consulting while on a pension?

[itwerx]

Uhh consulting while on a pension?... does anyone else see a problem with this?

Not at all. Heck I know a guy right now who collects two pensions, both from the US government! (One from when he retired after 20 years in the Marines and the other when he retired again 20 years later from the USPS). It took him a little legal wrangling when they tried to stiff him awhile back but he won in court.
And that's the USG! If his pension is private sector then it's even more legit...

Re:Uhh consulting while on a pension?

[Kalak]

Retired from a company =! not working at all.

Re:Uhh consulting while on a pension?

[mcg1969]

No, why should we? There's no reason to assume that his pension precludes supplementation.

Re:Uhh consulting while on a pension?

[tannhaus]

You can retire from a company and still work elsewhere. Many retired people still work....just notice that greeter at walmart.

A pension is not a disability payment. It's an agreement that if you work for me this long and then stop working for me, I still have to pay you x amount of dollars and give you x benefits.

Re:Uhh consulting while on a pension?

[koreaman]

Bad coder! No computer for you!

Re:Uhh consulting while on a pension?

[Wandering Wombat]

My Grandpa, as a railroad engineer, collected a pension from the US and Canadian branches of the company, and as one dollar fell, the other pension grew in value. Both were willable, and now my Gramma gets three pensions. I love economics.

As it is, I have to work a full time job and four contract jobs just to get by. God bless the modern age.

Re:Uhh consulting while on a pension?

[Anonymous Coward]

In most european countries it means you either stop working and live on the lower wages you get or you either forget about this and go on working on your own and loses any possible benefits. Working for extras is really discoraged or even impossible in some cases. At this point I'm not sure if that a good thing or not but in that sense its a real disabilty payment.

Re:Uhh consulting while on a pension?

[ttroutma]

No, why?

Remember kids

[Anonymous Coward]

Strong IP protections are necessary because if it weren't for monetary benfits ensured to corporate research labs, we wouldn't benefit from the inventions they create!

Right? ....Right?

Re:Remember kids

[shade2600]

The article states:

' For inventors, it's about more than commercial success anyway, Hesselink said: "You do it because you have a love for it." '

Those who can afford the protection of IP are the corporations who didn't invent the technology in the first place. Is that more fair?

Is the very industry that allows slashdot to exist supported by a technology boom created in a significant part by optical media? Is the portability of data benefiting nearly everyone on the planet?

History is kind to people like Jim Russell, and not to those who take the technology and defend it as their own. Jim is reaping the benefits of his creation, because it helped so many people. That is worth more than any paycheck.

"How can I lose faith in the justice of life, when the dreams of those who sleep upon feathers are not more beautiful than the dreams of those who sleep upon the earth? " - Gibran Khalil Gibran 'Sand and Foam'

http://leb.net/gibran/works/sand/sand.html

Re:Remember kids

[nwbvt]

The point of this (slightly old) article is that this is a guy who got screwed because of lax IP protections. I don't think your point works well with it. By the time the company that he was working for (and which owned the patent) had settled the lawsuit, he was no longer working for them.

DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the same poor son of a bitch who's kicking himself in the ass for selling DOS to Microsoft for a few hundred bucks. :D

Re:DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially since Bellevue, WA is directly ACROSS THE STREET from Redmond :)

Re:DOS

[packeteer]

I dunno about across the street. Maybe you meant a few minutes on the freeway? But yes its only a couple of miles.

Ripped off

[rost0031]

That really does suck especially when Amazon can patent 1-click stuff. This guy actually changed the face of entertainment, technology, and storage. Not a penny? That really does bite.

Re:Ripped off

[GGardner]

How much "royalties" does the coder who implemented 1-click get, do you think?

Re:Ripped off

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please, optical storage was the most obvious "innovation" in the history of computers. If he was able to patent it, I would have been outraged.

Re:Ripped off

[Kjella]

I'm sure the patent lawyer who "invented" it, is getting far better paid than he deserves.

Kjella

Re:Ripped off

[lottameez]

Probably none. Most employment agreements give the employer IP rights to things employees are paid to develop.

Re:Ripped off

[Krach42]

There have been a number of people who patent really good ideas (for instance, self-contained cartridges for bullets), but the companies just wait for these patents to expire if the person isn't willing to be "exploited".

The do this, because even if the person *could* extend the patent, they can't, because they're not making money from the invention, so it's usually just as good to throw the money into the toilet as to renew a non-income-generating patent.

Patents protect people with money, and companies with money, don't think much of anything else. Otherwise, they'll usually just wait out a patent. It's in their interests. Spend tons of money now, or wait until the patent expires, then you can get it yourself, because the plans and ideas are then public domain.

Re:Ripped off

[PainBot]

So you think the guy actually exists ?

Re:Ripped off

[Anonymous Coward]

No it doesn't. It means cheaper cd's and dvd's for me (not that I buy them). What would you hypocritical slashdolters have? This guy making loads of money from imposing patents and licensing?

Re:Ripped off

[quarkscat]

This story perfectly illustrates one of the
differences in patent law between the good
old USA and Germany.

In the USA, the employee's invention & patent
is owned by the employer.

In Germany, the employee's invention & patent
is owned by the employee.

Most US corporations require that employees
sign away all their rights to any innovation,
regardless of whether it was developed on the
job (or even job-related) or not. Even without
relinquishing such rights, the employee has
little legal recourse in American courts. In
effect, the employer owns the employee.

Considering the direction that corporate pensions
and benefits are headed in the USA, which is:
none (now 401K), and shrinking (eg. medical), the
imbalance in favor of the corporation is getting
worse. When the increase in L-1 and H1-B visas,
and the RIFs in favor of offshore outsourcing are
taken into account, the future of innovation in
the USA looks bleak. Finally, the whole issue
of software patents and the ridiculous position
adopted by the USPTO, it is apparent that the
USA's corporations are trading in their long term
financial and industry growth for potential
short term profits.

Re:Ripped off

[geekoid]

in the US patent renewal is pretty cheap for the individual.

also, there is more then one company in the world.
If I had invented self-contained cartridges for bullets, I would have tried to use the gun makers against each other.
if that didn't work, I would have presented it to the military and convince them of it's benefits. Then they could start accepting bids. Now your in position to lisense your product to multiple companies.

It is not enough to invent something, toss it out on the porch and hope someone pays you money.

Now, I don't know the story behind self-contained cartridges for bullets, but my point is valid.

Re:Ripped off

[Shadowlore]

Considering the direction that corporate pensions
and benefits are headed in the USA, which is:
none (now 401K)

Actually, the 401ks are more stable and reliable than the old pension system. Under the old pension system if the company goes belly up, you lose it. With 401ks if the company goes belly up, your 401k is still there. Also, in an age of frequent job changes, a 401k provides carryover benefit whereas the pension system had you lose your accrued benefit.

and shrinking (eg. medical)

My medical coverage got better. But we are overinsured in that field so some "shrinkage" would be good. Boy there's joke in there somewhere.

Most US corporations require that employees
sign away all their rights to any innovation,
regardless of whether it was developed on the
job (or even job-related) or not. Even without
relinquishing such rights, the employee has
little legal recourse in American courts.

Actually in my experience with BigCorps, unless your development can be shown to have been developed at work or at least directly related to your job they've mos toften lost in court. Most BigCorps know that their sweeping "we own everything you think about" agreements fail to hold water in court so they often silenty "ignore" your innovations that have nothing to do with your job and were not done on company time/owned equipment. The risk of losing in a public courtroom is too great a threat to the implied threat. Rather like "better to silently ignore it and let your agreement seem iron-clad than to sue and show it is full of holes".

And yes, I speak from experience.

Re:Ripped off

[vsprintf]

So you think the guy actually exists ?

Yes, the tale of Juan Kleck, the programmer son of a Mexican pop singer mother and German industrialist father is widely known. The way he was ripped off by Amazon is the main reason Bezos is so reviled on Slashdot. (C'mon, somebody get the butterfly net while I keep him occupied . . .)

Re:Ripped off

[losycompresion]

"..... it is apparent that the USA's corporations are trading in their long term financial and industry growth for potential short term profits." in one word, Duh. Its a sad state of the US system. My companys new VP has held positions in 4 companies in the last 5 years.(That was stated as proof of his experince when he was announced, what a joke) Given that track record where would be his motivation for long term profits for the company, assuming the trend of his employment continues.

Re:Ripped off

[velo_mike]

When the increase in L-1 and H1-B visas, and the RIFs in favor of offshore outsourcing are taken into account, the future of innovation in the USA looks bleak.

In addition to Shadowlore's above reply to your other nonsense - offshore outsourcing is not a bad thing, except for those few of us working in IT and unwilling to retrain. As it stands now, we're not offshoring innovation, we're sending the scut work abroad, just like we've done with manufacturing.

The US is still the lead in innovation, for example, Indians in the US have produced more patents than a much greater number of their contryment in India. This is due to conditions favorable to development - a mostly free market, a huge research base, and a largely educated people.

Germany? What a perfect example of who NOT to emulate. Check out the average German wage relative to costs, the unemployment rate, the tax burden, or the smoldering black hole their pension system is becoming. Look at the stranglehold the unions have on industry there.

As for H1-B's and L-1's, imho the visa programs should be abolished and anyone willing to come and work should be welcomed, let's throw out the welfare lifer's and other non-producers. People brave arrest and death to come here for jobs we turn our noses up at. Mexicans fight their way across the southern border, Chinese stow away in cargo ships, and cubans travel 90 miles on Bacardi cases to make $6 / hr jobs cleaning up after our asses and handling the most unmentionable tasks - these people ought to be citizens.

Re:Ripped off

[Anonymous Coward]

This is as it should be, stop whining.

The elite govern the poor, and we can't let the poor become elite by stealing our money from us through inventions and such.

Remember, the poor were born poor for a reason. They are lesser beings than the elite like us. Stop betraying your class.

Re:Ripped off

[Anonymous Coward]

Retrain for what?

Cleaning toilet bowls with our tongues?

Becoming a eunuch and safely satisfying a rich man's wife when he's on business?

Being a live underwear maniquine?

Seriously, what the f*** do you expect to get retrained for? You're 50 years old with no work experience using your new found skill. The only thing you'll be skilled at doing is ripping off food stamps.

Re:Ripped off

[Anonymous Coward]

Word.. Theidiot that you replying to is obviously a fucking managemtnt type, I.e a fucking parasite, who wouldn't know what good code was if it bit him.

Re:Ripped off

[RalphSlate]

As it stands now, we're not offshoring innovation, we're sending the scut work abroad, just like we've done with manufacturing.

Ah, you've bought into the talking point.

Our manufacturing was onced prized. Then it became "dirty factory work that no one wanted to do" and it was sent offshore.

Call centers were hailed as a great service job in the new service economy. But then the jobs were described as dead-end, and were sent offshore.

Computer programmers (a.k.a. computer engineers) were seen as the wave of the future. But then the jobs became "coding", it was called "scut work", and it was sent offshore.

Our accountants, bookkeepers, analysts were all jobs that kids aspired to be. But now they are called "backoffice" -- kind of like "back of the bus", and they are being sent offshore.

Now even radiologists -- full blown doctors -- are having their work outsourced. And every time I see the job described, it is described as "reading film". Sounds like lousy work, we better get rid of it.

Can't you see the pattern? Denigrate the job and no one weeps when it gets sent overseas.

Do you see much in the way of manufacturing design? Of course not. You need to know how to manufacture to be able to design something.

Likewise, once the "coding" jobs are all overseas, the design work will soon follow. After all, people who are most able to design something are those that know how to build it.

Keep living the lie that your "innovation job" is safe, if it lets you sleep at night. Because that takes an arrogant position that Americans are somehow genetically superior to our lower-paid bretheren in the third world. I've got news for you -- you're sadly mistaken.

Re:Ripped off

[pauljlucas]

This story perfectly illustrates one of the differences in patent law between the good old USA and Germany. In the USA, the employee's invention & patent is owned by the employer. In Germany, the employee's invention & patent is owned by the employee.

AFAIK, this has nothing to do with US patent law. There is no law in the US that says inventions of employees automatically belong to the employer. What does say that are typical employer agreements employees sign as a precondition of employment. Any company could leave patent rights assigned to the inventing employee if it wanted to.

What you need in the US would be a law either requiring patent rights be assigned to the inventor despite the the employer's wishes (thus making patent assignment clauses in employment contracts illegal) or the converse, i.e., a law forbidding employers from usurping patent rights of inventions by employees.

Re:Ripped off

[killbill!]

In Germany, the employee's invention & patent is owned by the employee.

Wrong. While it might be true in theory, in practice employment contracts hand over ownership of inventions to the employer, just like in the US.

I'm working at Porsche and, while we're all getting a nice bonus for each accepted patent, the company keeps ownership of whatever innovation I might come up with.

Re:Ripped off

[killbill!]

There have been a number of people who patent really good ideas, but the companies just wait for these patents to expire if the person isn't willing to be "exploited".

The do this, because even if the person *could* extend the patent, they can't, because they're not making money from the invention, so it's usually just as good to throw the money into the toilet as to renew a non-income-generating patent.
Amen to that. My great-grandfather was a railway engineer. After watching so many workers get crushed as they'd couple cars together, he invented the automatic system that is still used to do so nowadays (in France at least).

The train companies refused to use this obviously-useful invention, and preferred to let their employees die. Of course, when he couldn't afford to pay the fees anymore, the system was rolled out within a year.

Re:Ripped off

[velo_mike]

Ah, you've bought into the talking point.

Pot, this is the kettle calling...

Our manufacturing was onced prized. Then it became "dirty factory work that no one wanted to do" and it was sent offshore.

Speaking only for myself, I much prefer my $45 / hr coding job to the $20 / hr I could have made had Goodyear not moved those prized tire manufacturing jobs from my hometown (Akron, Ohio). Besides the money, there are those benefits like not dying of black lung at 60, being able to walk at the end of the day, keeping all 10 of my fingers attached...

Our manufacturing was onced prized. Then it became "dirty factory work that no one wanted to do" and it was sent offshore.
Call centers were hailed as a great service job in the new service economy. But then the jobs were described as dead-end, and were sent offshore.
Computer programmers (a.k.a. computer engineers) were seen as the wave of the future. But then the jobs became "coding", it was called "scut work", and it was sent offshore.
Our accountants, bookkeepers, analysts were all jobs that kids aspired to be. But now they are called "backoffice" -- kind of like "back of the bus", and they are being sent offshore.
Now even radiologists -- full blown doctors -- are having their work outsourced. And every time I see the job described, it is described as "reading film". Sounds like lousy work, we better get rid of it.
Can't you see the pattern? Denigrate the job and no one weeps when it gets sent overseas.

It's a cliche, I know, but the blacksmiths said the same thing... Guess what, we automated their jobs and later offshored them, do you honestly believe we would be better off with the old way? Comparative Advantage has shown itself to be true over and over for nearly 200 years, it doesn't suddenly become false when it's your job.

Keep living the lie that your "innovation job" is safe, if it lets you sleep at night.

I don't have an innovation job (typical J2EE developer) and I'm honest enough to admit to riding on others success - everything from the microprocessor to TCP/IP on up through the latest Java API. I'm also enough of a realist to know that I won't retire doing this and it's time (past time actually) to figure out my next move - so that 5 years down the line I'm sitting comfortably rather than whining about "those damn curry-heads took MY job". It's no different than the guys I grew up around, those perpetually unemployed people with "Work Union" and "Hungry, eat your import" bumper stickers on their rusted out pickups. Those were people who felt entitled to the job of their choosing, guys with no interest or will to pick a different field, and ultimately, guys who sat at home broke or grinding out a minimum wage living.

Because that takes an arrogant position that Americans are somehow genetically superior to our lower-paid bretheren in the third world. I've got news for you -- you're sadly mistaken.

Did you read what you just replied to? Allow me to repost my comment:
...This is due to conditions favorable to development - a mostly free market, a huge research base, and a largely educated people...
Where exactly did I take the position that "Americans are genetically superior"? The free market system is superior to command economies when it comes to favoring innovation, and our higher education system is still the leader in producing innovators. Those are what make the US one of the leaders in innovation, and barring a change to "protect our jobs", it will continue.

It's terrifying, the thought that we'll be basing our livelyhood on things not yet invented. You don't have to look back 100 years (the automobile, the telephone), 25 years (Compact Disc, PC's) but just 10 years (Java, DVD's) to find things that are now mainstream which had yet to be invented.

Re:Ripped off

[velo_mike]

Word.. Theidiot that you replying to is obviously a fucking managemtnt type, I.e a fucking parasite, who wouldn't know what good code was if it bit him.

You sure figured me out in a hurry <rolls eyes>. As you're thinking about retraining, might I suggest an English course...

Re:Ripped off

[Malevolyn]

Microsoft can patent double clicking and "holding the mouse button down for a duration," if you remember correctly.

Re:Ripped off

[Anonymous Coward]

Economics - investors are rewarded for risk. Sometimes an individual cannot see an idea to commercial fruition due to development, marketing, labor, maufacturing costs. Perhaps the company which he/she works for, in bearing some risk of development, marketing, labor, manufacturing, should be rewarded for taking that risk.

Re:Ripped off

[DM9290]

Germany? What a perfect example of who NOT to emulate. Check out the average German wage relative to costs, the unemployment rate, the tax burden, or the smoldering black hole their pension system is becoming. Look at the stranglehold the unions have on industry there.

Especially considering their entire country was practically destroyed during WWII, chopped in half and occupied by the soviets, had to be rebuilt from scratch, and convert from communism to capitalism and reformed, while the USA went more or less unscathed. (I mean... excepting all the harm the civil rights did)

Considering that a major portion of the Cold War was practically fought inside Germany you would think Germany ought to have a higher standard of living than the United States by now.

I mean.. come on.. Japan has almost caught up, and the USA dropped 2 nukes on Japan and Japan is routinely hit by tsunami's, earthquakes and typhoons.

Perhaps we should be looking at the Patent system used in Norway, since Norway beats the United States in the Human Development Index ratings. In fact they beat most everyone these days.

ohhh... and Norway has same legal sex marriage. This should be the first patent law reform we implement.
damn those civil rights.

Re:Ripped off

[Anonymous Coward]

You said it, now how do you fix it?

It's not well known enough or well understood enough to make it popular in american culture. Half the country thinks creationism is science, and a different set feels inventions come from well fundent scientists in research labs and have exotic mansions with batcaves beneath them.

Corporations, the only non-Washington body with actual political power, are quite happy (for the now) with the status quo. In a decade or two they'll be mostly broke as they find that once the innovation goes offshore, eventually the $$$ and executives who manage it go too. Corporations, especially the big publically traded mammoths, are not notorious for long term view thinking.

Engineers need to become more like businessmen. Don't do anything without seeing the money. Your time is money, charge appropriately.

Coding/design/testing/development is "cheap", i.e. highly skilled labor at a good salary. You put in at least 4 years of mostly beerless education, charge for it. If offshoring or other 1920's esque behavior prevails, unionize and fight. You are a factory worker, like it or not, act like one.

Invention is expensive, if you don't own significant interest in a company, you shouldn't invent anything. If you have a great idea you can't escape from, quit your job and develop it, take personal loans or whatever you have to. If it's good, someone will buy it, but they want to see it first.

Re:Ripped off

[uf22]

What you need in the US would be a law either requiring patent rights be assigned to the inventor despite the the employer's wishes (thus making patent assignment clauses in employment contracts illegal) or the converse, i.e., a law forbidding employers from usurping patent rights of inventions by employees.

These two possible solutions will in fact result in rather different outcomes for the state of innovation in the US. The first option, making patent assignment clauses in employment contracts illegal, would encourage innovation. It would do so by allowing potential entrepreneurs to earn a living while they hatch new ideas slowly in their spare time without having to take an "all or none" approach necessitating the quitting their jobs. The second option, making the employee clauses both legal and iron-clad, would result in a scenario where the "all or none" approach becomes the only option. With limited choices, the number of entrepreneurs that will take that leap to start a new business will decrease.

Perhaps the unique position between these two ends of the spectrum that we find in the US is the reason why we have been such a hotbed of innovation throughout our short history. Decisions made by the courts over the years have changed our position on this spectrum, but have we been moving in the right direction?

Re:Ripped off

[Anonymous Coward]

While I was a student at university I saw a great example of this. Leonard Lee, the founder of Lee Valley tools (If you haven't heard of them and are a do-it-yourselver look them up!) gave a speech and told us of a time he was looking to market a bunch of workshop accessories that used rare earth magnets. When he looked in to purchasing the magnets, the price was VERY high. He called some asian distributors who quoted him a fraction of the price, but had a strict date before which they couldn't sell him anything. They had tons of product, had done all their R&D, but were just plain waiting out the patent. They hadn't even bothered to approach the patent owners, they just knew they could flood the market as soon as the patent expired. While I'm not at all in favour of Disney copyright style patents, the current system doesn't seem quite right either.

Re:Ripped off

[Anonymous Coward]

In terms of GDP per capita per hour worked France and Germany are the most productive countries on the planet (outside the small banking-based nations such as Lichenstein). In terms of purchasing power parity they achieve about 70% of the average GDP per capita of the USA. Typical hours are about 70% of those of the USA. Essentially they have traded standard of living for hours. For those that value more time away from work this may equate to a similar quality of life.

With regard to the pension issue a shortfall is predicted in most Western nations including Germany, UK, and the USA.

Re:Ripped off

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at patents per million population is interesting. Most major western European nations manage about 100-270 per million and the USA 289 (there are variations is what is patentable) but Japan manages almost 1000!

Re:Ripped off

[RalphSlate]

Speaking only for myself, I much prefer my $45 / hr coding job to the $20 / hr I could have made had Goodyear not moved those prized tire manufacturing jobs from my hometown (Akron, Ohio).

There are two problems with that. First, we didn't create enough "coding jobs" for all the people who were displaced from the other industries that we shipped overseas, and second, you make the presumption that every factory worker is capable of coding. They are not.

The blacksmiths said the same thing... Guess what, we automated their jobs and later offshored them, do you honestly believe we would be better off with the old way?

You're making a grave mistake. You're using the advantages of automation to justify offshoring. They are two very different things.

Automation is pure innovation. Automation occurs gradually, as a series of small steps. People can react to it. And many people in an industry still have a chance of competing when their job gets automated, because their industry knowledge is useful in the new automated world. And innovation plainly occurs when automation takes place.

Offshoring does not create anything new. It creates no innovation. I would say that offshoring inhibits innovation. There is no longer the pressure to lower costs to stimulate innovation. Simply simply moving the work to a cheaper workforce relieves that pressure.

I also believe that the entire country would be better off if there was a range of jobs across all skill sets that paid well enough to live. My grandfather was able to earn a good enough living in a factory to build a house and to send his kids to college without a high school degree (which he couldn't get because his parents were farmers). No such jobs exist today. The leaders of this country need to realize that their economic system is designed to doom a large percentage of people to poverty and hopelessness. When that has happened other countries, revolutions occur.

Comparative Advantage has shown itself to be true over and over for nearly 200 years

Comparative advantage was theorized in an era where there was not instant mobility of capital. And comparative advantage has a caveat; the trade is supposed to be mutually beneficial. The trade that is being practiced is largely only beneficial to a small group of people controlling it. I'm still paying $80 for shoes that are now made in China, the same as I used to pay when they were made in Maine. But I'm now paying more taxes to support the laid-off shoemakers in Maine too. I don't see how I'm winning there.

Comparative advantage has this nasty little habit of destroying people and places. One only has to look within the US to see the damage it has done - when manufacturing moved from the Northeast to the South, the Northeast was left with poverty that it has not yet helped to this day.

Comparative advantage is more about cost avoidance than it is about lower costs. Comparative advantage lets companies escape the repercussions of their activities. They couldn't avoid them entirely when the escape was merely within the US - the federal government ensured that. But with no world government, corporations are free to do as they please, pitting groups of people against each other with no referee. No wonder companies are rushing to the global playing field.

This country has been declining ever since it has become easy to move goods across the world relatively easily. While this has made everyone's standard of living rise, it has also increased the gap between the poor and the rich. And as it becomes easier to move capital and goods to the lowest bidder, our way of life gets worse and worse, except for the small group of people controlling the flow.

I haven't exactly seen the demand for US goods increase in countries that have been doing work for the US for dozens of years. Just how long should we sit back and wait for the "benefits" of unfettered trade to materialize? We have waited so long that this is

Re:Ripped off

[Anonymous Coward]

You make many points, some of which I agree with, some of which are absurd.

If what you say about Germany is true, then it's very strange to say the least. *ANYTHING* job-related which the employee creates/invents/designs/etc, during office hours, -is- -the- -property- -of- -the- -employer-. What the fuck is the employee being paid for? As an employer (which I am), I am PAYING you for your time, your skills, your contribution, etc. The value that you add to the business helps employ others, and contributes to the economy.

Too many people think businesses owes them something - wake up morons! Businesses owe you (as an employee) nothing except respect, your salary+benefits, and a seat for your arse.

The USA is fucked in many respects, but I agree with their business and legal principles - to a point (eg, their patent system is really flawed).

An employer.
Johannesburg
South Africa

Re:Ripped off

[Krach42]

No matter how cheap it is, how long will you hold on to a patent that isn't making money?

True, there were multiple companies. I'm a little fuzy on the details myself. I do know that one company produced the self-contained cartridges, but no one would license the technology (or weren't allowed to) and I also know for certain, that they stopped the patent because it wasn't making enough money, and that almost immediately every company in the US began producing self-contained cartridges.

As for the military, the military has used about 4 standard rifles in their entire history. In the revolutionary war, they were using non-standard muskets, in the civil war they were still using un-cased ammunition (despite this technology being available already), then they had the M1 from either WWI, or WW2, until Vietnam, at which point they switched to the M16.

Now, do you *really* think that the military of that time being incredibly slow to adopt new technology in weapons, would even care about this? Because History proves that they were not at all interested. The cost to refit the military, was beyond any benifits to be gained.

And your points *are* valid, especially today, but fact is that people all the time are screwed out of earnings on their intellectual property (patent-wise) from companies choosing to collectively wait rather than pay. (especially in a market where people aren't aching for new technology. When people were still buying audio tapes for extortionistic prices, why pay money to someone to make a new technology that will reduce your margin?)

IRS

[Anonymous Coward]

I do.

Will you ring up the IRS or should I do it?

and if he would have patented it

[hsmith]

and sold the rights, /. would curse him

Re:and if he would have patented it

[kryogen1x]

If he had sold the rights to Microsoft, /. would curse him.

Re:and if he would have patented it

[theREALMcCoy]

This is wisdom. The sad hypocritical truth.

Re:and if he would have patented it

[Alsee]

WTF? And you got modded 5 insightful for that rediculous claim?

There is almost no one on Slashdot that objects to patents on inventions.

What you are (mistakenly) reffering to is the fact that virtually every programmer (and the large majority of Slashdoters) objects to SOFTWARE patents. Patenting math is absurd. Patenting logic is absurd. Patenting mental steps is absurd. A program is not an invention. Physical objects are potentially inventions, and physical processes are potentially inventions. A calculation is not an invention, and there is absolutely nothing inventive about using a computer simply to carry out a calculation faster.

Programmers are software authors, and most everyone here agrees that software is appropriately protected by copyright. (Setting aside arguments over the appropriate extent of copyright.)

-

I dont care...

[Anonymous Coward]

He's probably not getting any money from me as I'm not going to listen to the CD or watch the DVD anyway - unless they are digitally signed.

ahhh The life of an inventor....

[Anonymous Coward]

Al Gore invented the Internet - I don't think he gets any royalties either? Does Edison's estate get royalties from every light bulb sold? Include this guys paypal account and I'll throw him a dollar.

Good, bad, ugly...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

OK, so in THIS case patents are BAD because someone else is making bank on this guys IP, but could have been GOOD if this guy had protected his IP, but than he and his patent would be BAD because he would have been making bank on his IP...

Re:Good, bad, ugly...

[PoopJuggler]

It was my understanding from the article that the technology was patented by the company he worked for, but licensed super-cheap to the big boys. Stupid stupid stupid.

Re:Good, bad, ugly...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it sucks, because this dude came up with a great idea (apparently), it revolutionizes the industry, companies get rich using his idea, and he doesn't get shit. That sucks, especially in a world where supposedly, if you come up with a great idea, you can get patent protection, make big money, and retire.

Without having done any research on this, I imagine that some entity holds a patent on this technology. I thought that part of the reason capitalism was supposed to be great, is the promise of a big reward. If this guy did it as a work for hire and didn't have any rights, technically it would be tough shit for him.

However, people that come up with revolutionary ideas and things that change the way we do things for the better (hopefully), should be taken care of by society. It's in our own general interest, as well as the company that employs a person, to provide them with enough resources and encouragement that maybe it will foster more creativity and they will have more great ideas. I suppose that's too idealistic, and the bean counters and middle managers will do their best to make sure we never see the day.

Re:Good, bad, ugly...

[Znork]

That's the entire problem with patents. They could be good for inventors. In theory. But the theory is wrong and it doesnt work out that way.

Had he had the patent himself he wouldnt have been able to afford to file a lawsuit anyway. He'd be squashed like a bug by some large corp. His only chance would be to sell the patents to a litigation company, in which case he'd get a miniscule amount again...

Patents do not make money for inventors. They make money for lawyers and they protect monopolies and oligopolies against inventors.

Re:Good, bad, ugly...

[FriendComputer]

Wait - does this patent come with a free Frogurt?

Re:Good, bad, ugly...

[geekoid]

"Had he had the patent himself he wouldnt have been able to afford to file a lawsuit anyway. He'd be squashed like a bug by some large corp."

why? what proof do you have this would happen? everybody says thae people get too much momney when they sue, then they say people can't sue. can't be both.

many, many people have made money from patentining there product. Many individuas have fought corps and won. man, get real.

This guy exchanged his IP rights for a regular pay check.

Re:Good, bad, ugly...

[16K Ram Pack]

That's not always the case.

Take James Dyson. He created the dual-cyclone cleaner, and someone tried to rip him off. So, he went to court and won and his company is IIRC the market leader in the UK.

Re:Good, bad, ugly...

[alexq]

One could argue that patents are there to defend corporations' intellectual property. I'm not sure it'd be good to argue it, but probably there is something to it...

Not ripped off

[Anonymous Coward]

He was not ripped off - he screwed up. He should have patented his invention.

As long as it was not patented, it was free for everyone.

Justice??

[travisco_nabisco]

This poor man gave us portable mass storage, in a form previously undreampt of, and now, most people don't even know who he is. Where is the justice in this world?

Re:Justice??

[Total_Wimp]

Plus, the glass recording disks are bad-ass. It's like something from the future made in 1974.

I once took one of those clear spacer disks from a CD spindle and convinced a couple of the people in our office that they were a new type of CD. They thought the clear disk was the coolest thing until they tried to play it. I'd love to give them one of these and see their reaction.

TW

Re:Justice??

[OldAndSlow]

RTFA! He worked for Battelle, a not-for-profit research organization. They paid him to tinker. They patented his discoveries. They sold the patents.

Besides, he didn't give us portable storage, Phillips did that. This guy figured out how to use a laser to mark and read glass, a square piece of glass. A fine contribution, but a long way from CDs.

Re:Justice??

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree,
Reading the article made really feel for the man
I just hope that he's really happy no matter what and that the bastards who profited from his labor will all rot in hell someday

Re:Moron

[abramsh]

RTFA: He protected his rights, but he was owned by Battelle, and they sold the rights for next to nothing.

Simple fix

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Put a 5p (3c) tax on every CD and DVD sold from this date and all of it goes to him. He could live off that easily.

Hell to the RIAA the grand total would be less then they're spend on lawyers to sue little girls each week.

Re:Simple fix

[aj50]

Since when does 5p = 3c. Most types of cent are worth less than a penny, 5p = approx. 10c (US)

Re:Simple fix

[badfish99]

But then he would be incredibly rich. OK, he had one good idea a long time ago. Why should just a little effort guarantee him an enormous income for life? He was just doing what he was employed to do by Batelle. Why should "inventing" be any different from any other salaried occupation?

Re:Simple fix

[zaffir]

Because he made companies millions of dollars while you were filing your TPS reports.

I know some people who had one good idea a long time ago - they bought Microsoft stock when it first went public. Why should just a little effort guarantee them enormous income?

Re:Simple fix

[Elwood P Dowd]

And then we'd be paying twice: once for his patent, and twice for alms.

Should we make special laws for everyone who makes business mistakes?

Re:Simple fix

[smacktits]

He meant 'p' as in 'pence', the British Pound's equivalent of the American cent.

So at today's exchange rate, where 1 Pound Sterling is worth ~1.8 US Dollars, 5p is indeed worth around 3c.

Re:Simple fix

[Anonymous Coward]

So at today's exchange rate, where 1 Pound Sterling is worth ~1.8 US Dollars, 5p is indeed worth around 3c.

You fucking moron!

If 100 pence cost 1.8 dollars (180 cents), then each pence is worth 1.8 cents (or 5p is worth 9 cents).

Re:Simple fix

[Anonymous Coward]

What?!? Your maths is all out of goose...

Pound Sterling is worth ~1.8 US Dollars

That means...
100 pence = 180 cents
1 pence = 1.8 cents
3 pence = 5.4 cents
5 pence = 9 cents

Re:Simple fix

[glitch!]

He meant 'p' as in 'pence', the British Pound's equivalent of the American cent.

So at today's exchange rate, where 1 Pound Sterling is worth ~1.8 US Dollars, 5p is indeed worth around 3c.

I know a pound used to be 240 pence (12 shillings * 20 pence), and then 100 pence, but now it is only 33 pence to the pound?!

Re:Simple fix

[Anonymous Coward]

But those companies did work ALL THE TIME to get that income. No.

Re:Simple fix

[Grax]

Because if we did that for him we would have to do that for other creators like people that make movies and music. Oh wait. We already do that.

(It was for than a "little" effort. He worked on it for years.)

Re:Simple fix

[smacktits]

Okay okay, my math somehow got all fucked up. Sorry...

Re:Simple fix

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you get 3 copper out of 5 platinum? Okay I admit, that was bad.

Re:Simple fix

[neil.pearce]

I know a pound used to be 240 pence

I believe it used to be...

4 farthings = 1 penny
12 pennies = 1 shilling
2.5 shillings = half-crown
5 shillings = crown
20 shillings = 1 pound
21 shillings = 1 guinea

Re:Simple fix

[aussersterne]

What insane, ungrateful values you have. I love how the invention of a useful technology becomes not cause for gratitude, but rather, a sneering accusation.

It was a creation, not a business mistake. The same thing goes for Linux, and for the Magna Carta. Just because someone doesn't demand ransom from the world doesn't mean that their ideas aren't laudable, or deserving of material support.

Re:Simple fix

[CanadianCrackPot]

Sorry I pay enough CD taxes. The ones that allow me to make copies here in Canada are bad enough.

Re:Simple fix

[Elwood P Dowd]

wtf are you talking about? I'm not sneering at whatsisbucket over his invention. I'm not sneering at him over the regrettable business mistake that left him without compensation for his invention.

I'm sneering at someone who proposes a special tax in this one particular case to benefit this one particular guy. The dude isn't even asking for our money.

You've made a bit of a leap.

Self-Gratification

[pegasustonans]

He does get the self-gratification of having created something revolutionary. Not that that pays the bills, of course. He should be rewarded more than he has been, but isn't it also good that optical storage development has moved quicker without some of the restrictions it might have faced had the patents been effective forever?
I'm not saying that patents are bad, but I also think it's good that they have limits. And I still think this guy should get more recognition.

Re:Self-Gratification

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you prefer to be rich, or know that you had made a huge contribution to the human race?

Re:Self-Gratification

[Anonymous Coward]

Self-Gratification? Human Race? It sounds more like he made a huge contribution to Kleenex.

Re:Moron

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you read the link I provided? In a similar manner, he should have fought for his rights in court.

Trademarks and Copyrights can drive you crazy.

[freeze128]

Just look at this poor fellow. He lives at Bellevue! (Mental hospital)

Re:Trademarks and Copyrights can drive you crazy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Bellevue is a small suburb to Gothenburg. And probably a small suburb to any major city. The name is so widely used.

Re:Trademarks and Copyrights can drive you crazy.

[Zorilla]

It's also a hotel in Washington, D.C. Who gives a fuck?

Re:Trademarks and Copyrights can drive you crazy.

[anagama]

• Actually Bellevue is a small suburb to Gothenburg. And probably a small suburb to any major city. The name is so widely used.

Considering he worked for a long time at Handford (In WA state), I had assumed that the "Bellevue" mentioned is the one near Seattle - a very well-to-do area. I've done no research past my assumption however.

The whole Bellevue reference reminds me of a joke, probably understandable without explanation only to those of us in the Pacific Northwest:

• Q: What is a Bellvue woman's favorite position in bed?
• 
  A: Facing Nordstroms (*).

(*) Nordstroms is a pricey Department store.

Re:Trademarks and Copyrights can drive you crazy.

[Anonymous Coward]

I care and the additional correction is Hanford, WA not Handford, WA.

You're comment is more a statement of your IQ, you troll.

Re:Trademarks and Copyrights can drive you crazy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering I didn't mention Hanford, Washington state, I thank you for your affirmation of my I.Q. See you next time I cross the bridge.

Seat belt inventor the same

[Anonymous Coward]

The story of the guy, who invented the seat belt is the same.

NONE of the safety concerned car manufacturers were willing to pay a dime to use seat belt, as long as they would have to pay for it. The year after the patent expired, suddenly everybody buckled up.

I am not sure which is worst, the patent system or corporate greed.

Re:Seat belt inventor the same

[kertong]

Don't forget the "You Got Mail!" guy from AOL - he settled for a very (relatively) small one-time fee. Can you imagine how rich this guy would be if he got paid with royalties?

I think it's the same story as the guy who did the "Yahoooooo" yodel as well. I could be wrong - somebody correct me if I am, please. :)

Re:Seat belt inventor the same

[Shadowlore]

I am not sure which is worst, the patent system or corporate greed.

The patent system. At least corproate greed drives some innovation, the patent system as it sits now is mostly used to block innovation (or even perceived innovation). Usually by corporate greed.

Take the patent (armed monopoly enforcement) away and corproate greed loses a main tool in stifling innovation and advancement.

You can't take away greed; corporate or otherwise.

Re:Seat belt inventor the same

[rethin]

Yes and no.

According to this article
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-888893.html
The yodeler Wylie Gustafson was paid a one time fee of $590 for one television commercial in 1996.

Yahoo then took that same yodel and used it again and again in ther advertaisments without paying Wylie.

Wylie sued Yahoo and received an undisclosed sum of money. Proberbly on the order of a million dollars (he sued for 5 million).

After that Yahoo had a Yodel contest to replace Wylie's yodel
http://promotions.yahoo.com/yodel/
They paid some little girl $10,000 and proberbly forced her to sign over the rights to the yodel as well (to avoid another lawsuit.)

Rethin

Re:Seat belt inventor the same

[Anonymous Coward]

That's suspicious, considering seat belts were standard equipment in aircraft long before they went into cars. It's rather hard to fly a fighter plane without them; the controls use up all four extremities (stick, throttle, and two rudder pedals) which means you can't hold your own butt in the seat during negative-G maneuvers. By the time seat belts were offered in production cars, they were long past patent protection.

Re:Seat belt inventor the same

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Err... Obviously corporate greed, because that is what abuses the patent system. Duh.

Re:Seat belt inventor the same

[devilspgd]

Since when has prior art stopped the patent office?

Not only that, but the "in cars" or "for the purpose of safety rather then functionality" clause would probably be enough anyway.

Re:Seat belt inventor the same

[16K Ram Pack]

You mean the patent on the three-way belt that was granted to Volvo? Which Volvo then declared that they would not claim royalties on, thus allowing other manufacturers to use.

The patent was granted in 1959. I first remember being in a car with a 3-way belt in the early 1970s.

Re:Seat belt inventor the same

[Dr. Evil]

Note that the yodel is utterly worthless without the backing of a corporation willing to fork over the money to use it.

Re:Seat belt inventor the same

[Queer Boy]

I have a friend who is an EMS guy. He says he's never pulled a dead body out of a seat-belt.

Blame Canada?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

"That company ran out of money in 1985, and the patents went to a startup in Toronto, which hired Russell.

It sued Sony, Philips and music publishers for licensing fees and royalties on CD technology, but Russell was let go before settlements were reached, and he never got a share"

Yeah, those considerate Canadians. Fire the guy who invented your cash cow to cut him out of the profits.

Re:Blame Canada?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, we have real good teachers not too far south from us! The best in the world at fucking over anybody for a buck!

Re:Blame Canada?

[Anonymous Coward]

A "cash cow" a business that eats a lot of money, yet produces little in return. It does not refer to a business that rakes in the dough. How come nobody ever gets that right? Oh, that's right . . . they don't look up the information for themselves, they just follow the pack and hope noboby questions them on it. Kind of like pronouncing Brett Favre's name, huh? Every single person who ever pronounced it FARVE, knows they are pronouncing it incorrectly. Worse yet, they are aware of it!! But, somehow, ignorance prevails and eventually my MS Word spellchecker tries to correct proper spelling of "a lot" to "alot", which when I was growing up, got marked with a big, fat, RED magic marker for being incorrect!! But no offense to you, Mr. Anonymous Coward, I'm sure you look things up for yourself.

Re:Blame Canada?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well put. And they do worse for oil.

Re:Blame Canada?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cash Cow:

In business, a cash cow is a product or a business unit that generates unusually high profit margins: so high that it is responsible for a large amount of a company's operating profit.

Go crawl back under your bridge, troll.

Re:Blame Canada?

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is, the US marketplace makes no bones about being a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog world. We revel in it, take pride in it..wallow in it. Canadians, at least 99% of the ones you find on boards like this (or Fark, or Kuro5hin), never miss an opportunity to point out how superior they are to Americans, how life is better, the people are friendlier and how basically sunshine falls out of everyone's asses 24x7 one you get north of the border.

Well fine by me. Canadians have just earned themselves, as a result of their incessant rhetoric, the proverbial "held to higher standards" mantle. The torch is passed to you. The world now expects better from Canada.

Re:Blame Canada?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly my point, asshole. The definition changed since I was in school. Because everybody used it incorrectly, it has become the accepted definition. Please also refer to the now defined non-word:

Main Entry: ain't
Pronunciation: 'Ant
Etymology: contraction of are not
1 : am not : are not : is not
2 : have not : has not
3 : do not : does not : did not -- used in some varieties of Black English

Re:Blame Canada?

[John Sullivan]

Well, that's an awful lot of mud you're slinging there. Now, do you have any solid references to back you up? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_cow The above is what most people would understand "cash cow" to mean, was how the comment above used it, and is a usage that makes perfect sense. You also mentioned a clear mistake in Word's spelling checker, that (I just checked) doesn't seem to exist, at least not in my version. (I even tried switching from UK to US English to see if it was a regional thing.) You also drew attention to the original being posted AC, despite posting as AC yourself. Clearly trollish behaviour, I just can't see why you picked up on something so inconsequential to troll about. Perhaps you're just a Canadian who took offense at the original's slur but then went off at half cock with the retaliation.

Re:Moron

[Anonymous Coward]

So are we pro-IP or anti-IP this week on Slashdot?

Re:Moron

[spac3manspiff]

Jim Russell was just stupid.

It's apparent that he simply doesnt care for the business aspect of his work. Thats not a bad thing because it allowed him more time to focus on more productive things.

It would be a hugle gamble in spending the time/money in battling Sony and Phillips in court.

He is not the only one!

[Evan Meakyl]

Unfortunatelly, a lot of genius guys are in the same case: the man who discovered aspartame (Schlatter), the man who invented Tetris (Pazhitnov, never patented it because at the time intellectual property rights were not established in then communist Russia for private individuals...). I do think that in this case, patents are usefull because they can be seen as a reward for the usefull and good job done.

Re:He is not the only one!

[igny]

Zhores I. Alferov comes to mind. He got Nobel prize in physics for inventing laser diods some 40 years ago.
A quote: Laser diodes built with the same technology drive the flow of information in the Internet's fibre-optical cables. They are also found in CD players, bar-code readers and laser pointers.
If Alferov and Herbert Kroemer patented their ideas, they would be billionaires.

Re:He is not the only one!

[Anonymous Coward]

the man who invented Tetris (Pazhitnov, never patented it because at the time intellectual property rights were not established in then communist Russia for private individuals...)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the political climate at the time was such that in Soviet Russia, you did not patent Tetris, Tetris patented you!

Re:He is not the only one!

[Jedi Alec]

Tetris was made by a russian? as in, in Soviet Russia funny shaped blocks fall on you!? sorry, bad pun, couldn't resist ;-)

Re:He is not the only one!

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a fallacy to assume their ideas would be as widely used today if they had patented their ideas. In reality, chances are patents would have simply meant a twenty-year wait before the public at large got to use the technology. They might have become millionaires from military users of their patents, of course, but often you see arguments along the lines of "look how widely used freely available technology X is! If only it had been patented, the inventors would have made biillions of dollaaars!" - which is just wrong.

In this case, the internet backbones may have simply run on copper for longer if the technology had been patented and therefore not at commodity pricing levels.

It goes to show...

[jd]

Patents and IP don't protect inventors, who have neither money nor time to go messing around with patents. (The more time you spend with bits of paper, the less time you've got to spend with actually doing something.)

What it proves is that patents protect the fist to patent, even if there's "prior art". (If "prior art" counted, then the patents should never have been awarded, as this guy had working systems prior to the "invention" by the corporations who held the patents.)

The ones with time and money are generally not the ones working their asses off doing the inventing. They can either sponge off their R&D workforce, or they can sponge off other inventors. The latter is cheaper, as they don't even have to pay wages, then.

The research for patents is expensive and time-consuming. If your next meal depends on coming up with another idea and selling it, you probably aren't going to have either time or money to spend.

Let's face it. The system is broken. Seriously broken. I don't know how best it could be fixed, but something needs to be done before it destroys the entire inventing subculture altogether.

Re:It goes to show...

[Anonymous Coward]

before it destroys the entire inventing subculture altogether.

That's not going to happen. It just means the inventing subculture should be working on inventive ways to kill lawyers. I suggest sniper masers. Why nasty lawyer head a-splode?

Re:It goes to show...

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize lawyers donate some of their time for pro bono work which could benefit an inventor if he took the time to ask for the help, right?

Lawyers are not bad people. It's disgusting that so many people misunderstand what lawyers do. As an engineer and a law student, I'm finding my fellow future attorneys are orders of magnitude more ethical than the average engineer. How sad is that?

Pathetic.

Re:It goes to show...

[Anonymous Coward]

A lawyer's definition of "pro bono" hinges on what constitutes "bono". There are indeed more than a few starting-out lawyers to help you patent stuff, to add to the sickness.

Very few will help you dismantle the unjust patent system.

Re:It goes to show...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm finding my fellow future attorneys

A priest, a nun, and a lawyer, fall overboard into shark infested waters. The preist and the nun are immediately ripped to shreds. But the sharks refuse to eat the lawyer. Why?

Professional courtesy.

Re:It goes to show...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, there are a lot of good lawyers out there. They defend innocent people, they prosecute criminals. They help draft contracts, they help decode the contracts their buddy wrote back into english.

Then there are the bad ones, that go out and chase ambulances, inflate damages into the millions so they can draw a % cut of award instead of an hourly rate or salary. The bad appples turn the whole bunch rotten. Since your fellow attorneys resist disbarring the bad bunch, you have about as much legitimacy as the "pro"lifers who refuse to "out" the various people who shoot up or bomb clinics, or mainstream Islam who refuses to condemn the fatwas issued by bin Laden. Or the doctors who kill person after person, get slapped with tiny fines, but even after being sued for malpractice dozens of times a year, somehow never manage to get their license stripped from them.

If you want to be "not bad people", then your "people" need to shape up and act like it.

Re:It goes to show...

[LaCosaNostradamus]

I strongly doubt the invention subculture will be destroyed. Instead, we will see the trend that has already gotten a good start: widespread lawlessness. And it's going to get a lot worse. The only defense the people have left against a bad legal system is to become common criminals. The invention subculture will simply become criminal ... like the drug subculture. The subcultural incentive for these areas is too strong to destroy; certainly too strong for something as lame as the law. Laws have very little force. Economics is a much stronger force.

Great opportunity for MS

[Anonymous Coward]

This poor guy invented optical storage

And Microsoft will probably patent it.

Slashdot swings both ways

[Control Group]

You know, we complain when a company exerts market influence via patents...then we complain when a patent isn't enforced...I sense a logical inconsistency, here.

Let me put on my "surprised" face.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[Anonymous Coward]

The patent WAS enforced, just the inventor gave his rights to a company that never gave him a share of their profites. You need to RTFA and stop whining about the Slashdot community.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[Anonymous Coward]

We? Count me out, jerkwad. I regard ALL patents as immoral.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[admiralh]

There's nothing logically inconsistent about the stances given the circumstances.

Case 1: Company buys up many questionable patents for next to nothing, then hires a squadron of patent attorneys to try to extract royalties from whomever doesn't have the time/energy/money to fight them.

Opinion: Questionable patents bad - companies greedy/stupid.

Case 2: Inventor creates well-deserved patent which leads to multi-billion dollars of business for many companies and does not receive a cent of royalties, due to bad/greedy decisions by corporate management.

Opinion: Well-deserved patents good - companies greedy/stupid.

Where is this logical inconsistency again?

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[AlXtreme]

Logical inconsistency? This article shows that patents don't work when it comes to protecting a 'real-world' invention. They sure as hell don't work when it comes to protecting virtual ones.

If this article underlines anything, it's that patents are flawed. Do you want to make money from an invention? Make sure you have the business know-how to make money by exploiting that invention.

Patents didn't work for this lad or the Wright brothers, patents work for IBM, Microsoft, Sony, Philips and the like.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[stratjakt]

due to bad/greedy decisions by corporate management

Sounds like it was more due to his own ineptitude or inability to vigorously defend his claims.

He could have easily found a lawyer to take on the deep pockets of Sony and Philips pro bono - that is if the case was as clear cut as he says so.

The article talks about him reading bits back of an etched piece of glass - which is pretty far away from a modern CD or DVD.

Using a light source and phototransmitter to transmit 1's and 0's dates back to the 30s.

I've seen pictures of big wheels with holes punched in them to represent the bits, basically a flashlight on one side, and a big ass photocell (or whatever they used in those days) on the other side.

I'm not certain what he describes passes the "obvioussness" test, since he basically adapted an existing A-D converter to be fed from a photosensor.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[Surt]

It may surprise you to learn, slashdot is composed of more than two people.

Different people, different opinions.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be a total tool. Nothing isblack and white, patents are and should be decided on a case by case basis.

The parent should not be modded up, the writer is thinking in binary with little consideration for the factors at hand.

Its discraceful how such comments appeal with little to no envidence.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[Kalak]

This is not a software patent, which is usually what is talked about as being "bad" on /.

This is a patent on the material object, not a intellecutal process. They are considered different by many, especially since one has had patents for a *long* time, the other only a few years, and in limited areas (*cough* US *cough*). Optical media date back to before software patents existed.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[jcenters]

Okay, let me explain something here for all the people who point out the "logical inconsistencies" that many /. readers have in regards to IP.

It's actually very simple. Nerds, who see themselves as doing all the hard work, detest suits, who just sit on their asses but make all the profit.

So, in summary, the nerds cheer for each other, the little guy, and boo the big faceless corps.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[Moofie]

Funny you mention the Wright brothers.

Patents most certainly DID work for them. They were some of the most litigious patent holders of the early part of this century.

Some idiot judge decided that they should be awarded a patent on the notion of powered flight, rather than a patent on their mechanism for lateral stability. The Wrights proceeded to use that ridiculously over-broad patent to run other American companies (read: inventors) out of the airplane business.

For many years, the only aircraft innovations were coming out of Europe. The Wrights were content to rest on their laurels (and their unstable and unreliable design), and attack anybody who tried to improve on the airplane as a patent infringer.

Fortunately, the Feds finally put a stop to that when they apprehended the military utility of powered flight, and saw how the state of the art was progressing overseas.

Ironically, one of the Wright's principal US competitors (Glenn Curtiss) a) built the Wrights' first motor, b) invented the layout of the airplane as we commonly know it today, and c) wound up owning the Wright aircraft company.

So, in this case, it was a happy ending. The better innovator (Curtiss) won out in the end, and the Wrights died bitter.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[werfele]

The article talks about him reading bits back of an etched piece of glass - which is pretty far away from a modern CD or DVD.
. . .
The article talks about him reading bits back of an etched piece of glass - which is pretty far away from a modern CD or DVD.

The technical merits of his invention are irrelevant to his legal claim. The intellectual property of his works-for-hire would belong to his employer, unless he had a contract specifying otherwise, which would be extremely unlikely, and which the article suggest was not the case. The article establishes that his employer sold those rights, so neither he nor his employee had any rights to the invention at the time things got interesting.

I don't think he could have found a pro bono attorney to help him, given that he sold his rights to the invention when he accepted his paycheck.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[AlXtreme]

Mod parent +1 Insightful

I always thought that the Wright brothers died in bitterness due to others running off with their 'innovations' while not being able to enforce their patents. I wasn't aware that they did that so aggresively as to stall the entire US airplane market, and actually were very successful with it.

Thanks for correcting me, next time I'll put the Wrights next to $BIGCORP instead.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[Moofie]

If you're interested, I recommend Seth Shulmann's "Unlocking the Sky". Excellent history of the topic.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the layout of the airplane as we commonly know it today came from the design of an airplane from Santos Dumont, that brazilian living in France that flew around the Eiffel tower one year after the Wright brothers did their first flight.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[16K Ram Pack]

That's a great post and speaks volumes about many attitudes to patents and "IP".

Companies have, for years and years sought out a guaranteed money maker, that they can do a little work and just watch the money roll in.

All stagnant fat cat money makers die eventually (this may also include western economies in general). If you don't continue to innovate and improve, someone else will win. Doesn't matter if you've got a patent, someone will find a way around it.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[Moofie]

Fair play, yes. Santos Dumont was another pioneer, and did indeed have an aft-tail monoplane very early on.

I was thinking specifically about ailerons, and the control stick/yoke arrangement, which were Curtiss developments. Your point is well taken.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[Moofie]

I think you're absolutely right. TiVo is right in the thick of just that problem. They were first to market, and have a superb interface (I'm a new convert), but they're rather spendy and the cable companies are nipping at their heels.

It will be interesting to see if TiVo can continue to innovate and stay ahead of the curve. I hope so.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[Moofie]

"this may also include western economies in general" Hmm...I'm curious as to what other economic models seem to drive innovation. I'm not aware of any.

There are lots of things wrong with Western style capitalism, but I don't think you can fault it for not producing innovation...

I don't believe it adequately rewards the innovators, for instance.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[16K Ram Pack]

What I'm referring to is western economies, not the western economic model. Perhaps I should have said countries in Europe and the USA.

Maybe that's a bad way of putting it, but what I see in the west is countries full of fat and stagnation. Everyone expects the government to sort out their ass and look after their job, whilst wanting cheap goods from elsewhere. Ambulance-chasing lawyers are big business. America is how many billions of dollars in debt?

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[Moofie]

But, specifically in terms of innovation, the United States drives the whole world.

Japan traditionally takes existing ideas and polishes them until they gleam, and engineers the hell out of them so they're inexpensive, well-built, and just freakin' work.

However, inventing new stuff seems to happen an awful lot here in America. I wonder how we could keep that innovative spirit, and get rid of all the governments and lawyers? That would be ideal.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[16K Ram Pack]

The problem is the government and the laws (not really the lawyers, they are just doing their job).

It's also about the fact that societies like the USA and UK are getting infested with the attitude that they are not responsible, and an accident is someone else's fault.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways

[Moofie]

Since the government IS the lawyers, and they make the laws, it really does come back to the lawyers.

But, yes, I agree with you.

Sad, understandable

[Bronz]

First -- yes, these stories are sad. But what about the flip-side? Here's a creative soul who was gainfully employed to pursue his own imagination. He was paid to be creative. The problem was his creativity wasn't bound by the context of viability ... by what is currently applicable. The patents were sold cheaply because there was no immediate use for them.

This sounds harsh, but the way I see it he got paid to dream. Monetary compensation is only one way of keeping score and from my perspective this man is richer than most.

Which begs the question -- did he lose salary for every failed invention? He probably had a lot of hair-brained flops in his tenure ... and I don't see mention on how those things that didn't develop should be compensated by himself just as any success is immediately rewarded.

Re:Sad, understandable

[tsotha]

Yes. This guy was equipped and paid by a company that never would have done so if it didn't get control of his inventions.

The system isn't set up so much to reward people for ideas as much as it is to entice companies to pay the salaries of people like this. And that's as it should be - otherwise he might be working at the local hardware store.

Re:Sad, understandable

[lew3004]

You had me until your last paragraph. The whole point of invention is twofold: 1) invent something useful to consumers or business and profit, or; 2) invent because you like to. Now, when attempting to invent outside of the corporate world, one loses time and usually money so yes; it is possible (and most likely) that an inventor loses a lot on their flops. Usually, however they're also counting on that one big hit and it rarely happens outside of the corporate world because they have the R&D dollars to support it.

Double standard

[Have Blue]

We're expected to feel sorry for this person who failed to retain full control of his intellectual property? We see the opposite situation all the time- people and companies go to great lengths to control their intellectual property. And we laugh in their face and actively thwart their efforts. What would you think of this man if he had cemented his position as the owner of optical digital storage and charged royalties from everyone for its use? If the Sorenson codec algorithm had slipped out onto the open market through a similar process?

Re:Double standard

[stratjakt]

He had the patents, but was too chickenshit to sue. The TFA says his companies patent lawyer disagreed. Whatever. It's called a second opinion.

If I think Sony owes me millions, I'm not going to give two shits what my startup companys bean-counter (a lawyer in a corp that small is no more than a glorified accountant) has to say about it.

Re:Double standard

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the article is just a sob piece saying look how these nasty companies rolled a good honest working American. So next time you put on a CD remember this man cause without him you would still be sharpening cactus spines for your records.

Re:Double standard

[eobanb]

If he had cemented such a position, this might have been very good, actually. This guy, in 1974, digitally recorded television onto his optical storage media. Now it's 2004, and I still just have a VCR for recording shows. I honestly think development of this technology could have gone even faster had this guy retained control of it instead of Sony and Philips. Almost a decade after this guy proved that it was actually quite simple to store lots of digital video with his optical media, Sony develops CDs purely for audio, and Betamax tapes for video. If this guy had maintained control, DVDs could have entered the market in the late 80s.

Re:Double standard

[Percy_Blakeney]

If I think Sony owes me millions, I'm not going to give two shits what my startup companys bean-counter (a lawyer in a corp that small is no more than a glorified accountant) has to say about it.

You will care if the bean-counter is the one that owns the patents, as was the case in the story. He wasn't "too chickenshit to sue", as you so brilliantly put it, but rather had no legal recourse other than to bend over and take it -- the company funded his research and thus it ended up with control of the patents.

Re:Double standard

[Percy_Blakeney]

RTFA. He didn't have a position to cement in the first place -- he had no legal claim to the patents, which were owned by the company that employed him. They screwed up with the patents, not him.

Re:Double standard

[Anonymous Coward]

"The TFA"

So this is the way people at the department of redundancy department speak?

Re:Double standard

[devilspgd]

Because cassettes weren't invented until 15 years after CDs, right?

http://creativecommons.org/

[agent]

Setup a Pay Pal account then.
http://creativecommons.org/
http://www.bit torrent.com/
You need to ask for the adult links. ;-)
Peace.

Re:http://creativecommons.org/

[mikecito]

Are you kidding? This guy just made 8 million dollars after squandering a great business opportunity. 8 MILLION DOLLARS. That's more than fair compensation for one man's entire life work. Don't forget all the R&D costs companys pay out to find this stuff. Some get lucky. Some barely make it. Most go out of business. 8 Million is more than 95% of you on this site will make in your life. I think he's doing ok. Really. Calm down.

He and Philo T Farnsworth

[stratjakt]

Can both cry in their beers. Boo hoo.

It mentions 51 patents in the article, but then says that the patents were owned by a company that a venture capitalist started years later, and was bought by another company, and that's who Sony and Philips eventually had to pay royalties to.

So what gives? Did he sell his patents? If so he can't say he got "nothing" for his efforts. Sounds like sellers remorse to me.

I saw on the history channel, the guy who invented the safety pin sold the patent for like 5 bucks to pay off a gambling debt. It made the guy he sold it to richer than Jesus.

Re:He and Philo T Farnsworth

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's pretty clear that patents award business-savvy individuals much more than inventors. What a retarded system.

Re:He and Philo T Farnsworth

[stratjakt]

Depends, what does this guy want? Money or credit for the invention?

Business-savvy people tend to make more money in any system, as by definition they're better at it.

If all he want's is credit, well, he can have it. Ben Franklin never patented the lightning rod, which was unheard of. He thought it too important, and was more interested in it's life-saving potential than making a few bucks. In short, he didn't want money - he wanted credit, and he's got just that. Meanwhile, business-savvy people no doubt made a killing installing lightning rods back in the olden days.

Re:He and Philo T Farnsworth

[Yhippa]

Article on Philo Farnsworth.

Re:Moron

[Anonymous Coward]

So he messed up and now he's crying about it. Inventors gotta team up with a business savvy individual if they want to get rich. Real inventors don't worry about getting rich.

Get a grip

[johannesg]

Before you start flaming people for a perceived opinion they may not even have, read the fine article. It says he invented those basic principles some 20 years before CD's came onto the market. That means any patent he might have had would have expired by then.

Re:Get a grip

[hsmith]

so you deny that slashdot would lambaste him if he would have sold a patent for millions of dollars, so that we still have to pay him royalties? please, people consider that a mortal sin

Re:Get a grip

[Moofie]

Right, the famous Slashdot overmind. It's not possible for different humans who post here to have differing opinions on any topic.

It's all of us against you, the Only Holder of the Truth. Gosh, it must feel so GOOD to be morally superior to all us sheep!

Re:Get a grip

[natet]

Read the article before you tell people to get a grip. The article says the patents on his technology expired in 1991.

Re:Moron

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Just fucking patent everything you invent and only after that decide what you're going to do with it.

I agree. In fact everyone should just pay and go to law school for a years so that they can easily patent things themselves, and defend their rights. Also, everyone should inherit millions so they can afford to pay a team of high priced lawyers to fight on their behalf all the time. This idiot did not only not go to law school, but he did not inherit any money. I mean what was this idiot doing trying to invent something new? That is just stupid. Everyone knows it is easier to just patent something obvious then use your lawyers to intimidate people who can't afford to pay legal fees to fight you.

Does anyone care to point out any times the patent system has helped to foster innovation or protected the little guy in the last 10 years? If you did not read the article maybe you missed the part of the article where they state the patent was owned by the lab where he worked, and then transferred to a startup after the lab could not afford to fight the big companies in court. The startup eventually won in court and did make money, but not before they laid-off the inventor of the tech they were making money on. Here's an idea that might be useful, lets make patents only available to people, not companies. That way they can protect inventors, and not be used to suck money out of people who actually innovate and make things. Then we could finally get those flying cars they have been showing in movies about the future for the last hundred years.

Give me a break!

[theREALMcCoy]

what, now the govt's in the business of fund raising for poor saps?

Makes you think....

[Belial6]

Given that patents do exist, and likely will continue, maybe there should be very different price scales for patents depending on whether it is a corporation, or an individual getting the patent. If the price were very high for buisnesses, we wouldn't see so much patent squating by businesses, and if it were cheaper, maybe we would see more by individuals....

Re:Makes you think....

[hsmith]

there are different fee scales for patents, it is a lot more if you are a corporation compared to that if you are an individual.

and if you are an individual, the patent office must assist you through the process. but if you plan on a return on your investment, you better damn well do research and not complain about it, if you want to complain, hire someone to do the research for you and file the patent. there are means and it isn't to difficult.

This is why patents and copyrights are important.

[Anonymous Coward]

So that the guy that does the work and invents
things get the money.

Oh ... wait.

Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it curious how so many posters rage on about the evils of copyrights and patents but say poor guy in this case. When should it apply and when shouldn't it? Just need a score card so I know what's cool and what isn't. I favor the free market system but obviously that isn't cool these days.

Re:Interesting

[mikera]

Free markets may be great, but having patents is the absolute opposite of the free market philosophy.

What we need is a way of rewarding innovators that doesn't create patent/copyright/trademark monopolies.

I personally favour a system of "awards", rather like nobel prizes for innovation, but given out to the top 100 or so proven innovations every year. The boost to the economy gained from eliminating the highly inefficient patent system would more than pay for the cost of running this.

Re:Moron

[bigredradio]

No kidding. I hear so much about evil patents, unless it appears to favor the little guy. I think this proves that these guys are not really against patents, but the big companies that hold them. If this guy was rich because of his patent, /.ers would be bashing him.

Whatever.

[Elwood P Dowd]

As Macaulay said in 1841 (the example of Milton's granddaughter):

If, Sir, I wished to find a strong and perfect illustration of the effects which I anticipate from long copyright, I should select,--my honourable and learned friend will be surprised,--I should select the case of Milton's granddaughter. As often as this bill has been under discussion, the fate of Milton's granddaughter has been brought forward by the advocates of monopoly. My honourable and learned friend has repeatedly told the story with great eloquence and effect. He has dilated on the sufferings, on the abject poverty, of this ill-fated woman, the last of an illustrious race. He tells us that, in the extremity of her distress, Garrick gave her a benefit, that Johnson wrote a prologue, and that the public contributed some hundreds of pounds. Was it fit, he asks, that she should receive, in this eleemosynary form, a small portion of what was in truth a debt? Why, he asks, instead of obtaining a pittance from charity, did she not live in comfort and luxury on the proceeds of the sale of her ancestor's works? But, Sir, will my honourable and learned friend tell me that this event, which he has so often and so pathetically described, was caused by the shortness of the term of copyright? Why, at that time, the duration of copyright was longer than even he, at present, proposes to make it. The monopoly lasted, not sixty years, but for ever. At the time at which Milton's granddaughter asked charity, Milton's works were the exclusive property of a bookseller. Within a few months of the day on which the benefit was given at Garrick's theatre, the holder of the copyright of Paradise Lost,--I think it was Tonson,--applied to the Court of Chancery for an injunction against a bookseller who had published a cheap edition of the great epic poem, and obtained the injunction. The representation of Comus was, if I remember rightly, in 1750; the injunction in 1752. Here, then, is a perfect illustration of the effect of long copyright. Milton's works are the property of a single publisher. Everybody who wants them must buy them at Tonson's shop, and at Tonson's price. Whoever attempts to undersell Tonson is harassed with legal proceedings. Thousands who would gladly possess a copy of Paradise Lost, must forego that great enjoyment. And what, in the meantime, is the situation of the only person for whom we can suppose that the author, protected at such a cost to the public, was at all interested? She is reduced to utter destitution. Milton's works are under a monopoly. Milton's granddaughter is starving. The reader is pillaged; but the writer's family is not enriched. Society is taxed doubly. It has to give an exorbitant price for the poems; and it has at the same time to give alms to the only surviving descendant of the poet.

There's no proper change to patent law that would give this guy cash. No matter what, someone would have taken his patent just the same, and left him just as poor.

That said, I didn't rtfa. But I highly doubt there's any legislative way we could have made this guy get real paid.

Re:Whatever.

[stratjakt]

Short story - Sony and Philips start the CD consortium, this guy is convinced they're infringing on his patents. His small company IP lawyer disagrees. He does nothing.

Years later, another company buys the little company up, and sues Sony and Philips, who eventually cave and settle with a one-time licensing deal.

The way I read it, he had the gun, he had the ammo, but didn't have the balls to pull the trigger.

Pussy geek

[Anonymous Coward]

Did Nakamura have millions to fight for his right? No. He just did it.

This Russell guy is just a fucking pussy geek who just stood down when he should have been fighting like hell. Need money? Get a loan. Need a top-notch lawyer? Convince him/her of the value of your invention.

Re:Pussy geek

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

This Russell guy is just a fucking pussy geek

An anonymous coward calls someone a pussy? Look in the mirror coward. He never had the rights, just a share in a company that did. Legally, he had little or no recourse, and at the time no lawyer would have thought it was going to make any money. Nakamura may have won his case, but not before he was making good money at another job. He also won in the Japanese court system, not the U.S. Get a clue.

Others had this idea around same time as well

[Anonymous Coward]

There is another side to this story.

http://www.cdman.com/technical/howdocdswork2.htm l

According to Philips and Sony .. they didnt use this guys ideas for any of the main concepts. They had others working on it.

Looks like they had problems proving they intended it for audio use though.

Re:Others had this idea around same time as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Independent invention is no defence in patent suits. If it was, I imagine several of the strongest current objections to patents would evaporate.

the difference is...

[Anonymous Coward]

we don't like to see patents reinforcing the status of mighty corporations (particularly when they are patenting things that they have yet to invent or have no reasonable right to patent).

In this case it is the underdog who should have been protected - but once again large corporations win out. The moral of the story is, for the little guy, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't...

Snap your fingers and the lights come one, my idea

[Anonymous Coward]

"Snap your fingers and the lights come one or go off, that was my idea! But I didn't patent it....fo git aboud it"

"Everyone laughed at my pasta pot with drain holes, if I'd have patented it I'd be RICH!"

Geeze lots of people on this list sound like that crappy comerical for some "how to patent your idea" . You know where a bunch of dumbass's are claiming they created uniquely crappy ideas and didn't patent them and are out millions, ala the clapper, self draining pasta pot, and rollerblades!

fo git aboud it.......

Thats what happens..

[Anonymous Coward]

when you are a wage slave.

Re:Moron

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats not a bad thing because it allowed him more time to focus on more productive things.

Uh. Yes it is a bad thing, if it means that he's losing all his productive things to corporations.

All the inventors got screwed

[monopole]

I used to work for John Dove (http://www.uticaod.com/archive/2004/01/24/opinion /24587.html) who also developed many of the critical technologies for the optical disk and also got completely reamed by Sony/Phillips even though he had patents. In fact he wanted to assign the patents to the Air Force but they refused to allow him to (this was a year or two before the advent of the laser).

Another optical storage pioneer: John Dove

[waferhead]

http://www.uticaod.com/community/halloffame/histor y/dove_john.htm

He held patents related to the CD as well. He actually got a few dollars and a early prototype Laser Disk from Phillips, not sure how much he REALLY got, not too much, as a government employee, esp when the government gave it away.

He originally developed it as a replacement for paper tapes used for test data... Paper wasn't fast enough, was hard to manage, and buffering to memory was a no-op in those days.

I once worked for the gentleman: Great fellow.

Re:Another optical storage pioneer: John Dove

[Solder Fumes]

What are the odds? Two people in this great world, both of whom worked for John Dove, both of whom are Slashdot members, and both of whom posted the same post at exactly the same time?

Re:Moron

[ePhil_One]

So are we pro-IP or anti-IP this week on Slashdot?

This is determined on an article by article basis here on Slashdot.

Entertainment industry IP - BAD
Software Industry - Two categories
Open Source IP - GOOD
Closed Source IP - BAD

Confused? Don't be. Just apply this simple formula:

My IP - GOOD
Your IP - BAD

Above all, remain blind to to conflicts created by your positions.

Philips Research Laboratories

[MavEtJu]

He should have made a deal with Philips Electronics to work in the Philips Research Laboratories which are all around the world.

donations

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe the guy should put up a website and ask for donations. You never know...

Edison? He didnt invent the lightbulb.

[rufusdufus]

Thomas Edison is analgous to the head of the sony division that used Russel's patent at Sony; he did not invent the lightbulb.

When you look close at the history of technology, as an American you might find out how much hyperbole there is in the idea that "Amercans invented almost everything." The truth is more like we claimed credit for everything.

Re:Edison? He didnt invent the lightbulb.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point. What the USA does well is market and commercialize...

Re:Edison? He didnt invent the lightbulb.

[liangzai]

You mean like the American original of the Bible? Or Walt's original story "Snow White"?

Re:Edison? He didnt invent the lightbulb.

[Moofie]

Who is "we"? I've never claimed credit for anything. I am an American. Therefore, your claim is false.

Re:Edison? He didnt invent the lightbulb.

[Dun Malg]

Thomas Edison is analgous to the head of the sony division that used Russel's patent at Sony; he did not invent the lightbulb.

When people say "Edison invented the light bulb", they mean "invented the oxygen-free sealed glass globe with an incandescent filament inside". I think we can all agree that unless there's a filament surrounded by oxygen-free space contained in a translucent container, it ain't a light bulb. Let's take a look at the very page to which you link. First, the page is in error (or at least in confusion) with regard to the work of Humphrey Davy. Their statement:

When he connected wires to his battery and a piece of carbon, the carbon glowed, producing light. This is called an electric arc.

This is incorrect. Humphrey Davy essentially discovered the principle upon which the carbon arc light is based. An arc light doesn't make carbon glow by passing current through it, but rather by arcing current between two pieces of carbon. All this is neither here nor their, though, because an arc light is not a light bulb. Now, he may have experimented with smaller pieces of carbon which glow when current was passed through them, but he never made the critical leap to enclosing it in an oxygen-free environment.

Then there's Charles Francis Brush. He "manufactured some carbon arcs to light a public square". Again, an arc light, not a light bulb.

Then, finally, we get to Edison:

The inventor Thomas Alva Edison (in the USA) experimented with thousands of different filaments to find just the right materials to glow well and be long-lasting. In 1879, Edison discovered that a carbon filament in an oxygen-free bulb glowed but did not burn up for 40 hours. Edison eventually produced a bulb that could glow for over 1500 hours.

So now we finally have a light bulb. Invented by Edison. In the US.

While it can be said that Edison did not invent electric illumination, he was essentially the inventor of the "oxygen-free glass globe with incandescent filament" we now call the light bulb.

Re:Edison? He didnt invent the lightbulb.

[ploppy]

When people say "Edison invented the light bulb", they mean "invented the oxygen-free sealed glass globe with an incandescent filament inside".

Even on that definition Edison didn't invent the light bulb. Joseph Swan did.

So now we finally have a light bulb. Invented by Edison. In the US.

Nope. So we finally have a light bulb. Invented by Swan. In Britain.

Re:Edison? He didnt invent the lightbulb.

[Anonymous Coward]

To quote your page:

This meant that the conductors bringing electricity to the lamp would have to be relatively short (or impossibly thick), acceptable for an experiment or demonstration, but not for a commercial electrical system.

Re:Edison? He didnt invent the lightbulb.

[ploppy]

The argument was who invented the first light bulb, not the first commercially practical light bulb/electrical distribution system. I hardly think Edison's first bulb was immediately commercially viable either :-)

Re:Edison? He didnt invent the lightbulb.

[radtea]

The real point that these facts make is that the myth of the lone inventor who all on his own invents an entire, working, commercially viable invention is...a myth.

There may have been cases where this has happened, but they are so rare as to be irrelevant to the normal world of law. In the case at hand, it is clear that Swan had everything except a high-resistance filament. Edison had the high-resistance filament.

So who invented the light-bulb? The question isn't meaningful, except in the context of mythology. "Who invented the airplane?" is likewise somewhat muddy, as is "Who invented evolution?", "Who invented radio?", etc.

Within the pure sciences, Einstein's invention of General Relativity is uniquely individual--there were no viable competitors, although there were others working in the same area. Newtonian dynamics and gravitation were probably individual inventions, although components of the dynamics were known previously. Newtonian optics was likewise an individual invention. But even within the pure sciences in an age when collaboration was far less common than today, these instances of individual invention were rare.

--Tom

P.S. Yeah, I know most people think of scientists as making "discoveries" rather than inventions. They are wrong. Explorers discover. Scientists create. --T

Re:His Plight Awaits all Americans in China

[Anonymous Coward]

What ? This is way offtopic .. how does this pertain to what happened to this guy. What happened to this guy was settled by the courts .. ie, Philips (not a chinese company) claimed to have invented all the ideas .. but then later on it was proven that they did in fact use some of this guys ideas.

Re:Capitalism is about exploiting people

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and communism is NOT about letting everyone put in their share of work and then getting back your work's value either.

Shall we try another boneheaded idea?

Sorry, no injustice here

[tobiasly]

When a company is paying you to work for them, anything you create while on the clock belongs to them, not you.

This guy invented something while working for another company. That means the company owned the idea, they owned the research, they owned everything. He doesn't deserve a cent.

Re:Sorry, no injustice here

[tobiasly]

Yes, what is your point? If you don't like the terms of your employment, don't work for the company. That company paid him good money to be creative on their time. Of course they have a right to own whatever he designed.

As I said before, he doesn't deserve a cent, except of course for the money he already made in their employ.

Re:Sorry, no injustice here

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy invented something while working for another company. That means the company owned the idea, they owned the research, they owned everything. He doesn't deserve a cent.

So when he thinks of a good present for his wife or girlfriend, the company owns that idea and can raise the prices of those gifts accordingly?

In essence, the company owns him so completely that he becomes a slave to them? They own the inputs and outputs from his entire body, perhaps? Every mental flicker in his mind? They, alone, own the autobiography of his life, since it occured while working there? What, exactly, is left to the man employed by such a company? The odd hours he is not sleeping or at work? Does he, in fact, become a pure machine for the duration of the workday, with a brief period for lunch? Is his humanity lessened to such an extent that he no longer can truly say to possess himself or have free will? What other clearer definition of slavery is there?

In other terms, why can't the inventor consider the job as his employee, whom he tasks with the production of money which he pays for in the form of certain ideas that he is willing to give them? Contractors are essentially in this position. Notice the difference? Freedom! A contractor is under no obligation other than to deliver an agreed upon object in a given time frame.

I don't think there is any humane work environment that does not incorporate at least some of the ideals of a contractor. Not every minute and thought of every working hour can belong to the employer at the rates they pay. Contractors are paid much more for their services, with good reason. The employee is confused, unsure, and easily manipulated into subservience. To be in such a state implies the lack of critical thinking ability. The contractor has risen above servitude and dictates the terms of their own life, and as such they provide greater value due to their ability to reason logically.

The sad fact is that most people are not intelligent enough to rise above menial employment. The sob stories slashdot runs are about the people on the edge, those who could succeed in their own endeavors if they had the chance, but circumstance forced them into employment. As with fractals, the interesting places are at the edges. Of course, there are always the mundane contractors who are worth less than their weight in garbage, but they are simply playing the role of employer to even stupider companies. Only truly intelligent people and companies can both improve themselves by collaborating. Economics and society is not a zero sum game or prisoner's dilemma. Everyone can benifit given the right amout of intelligence and the proper pairing. To the unintelligent: Sorry!

Re:Moron

[mzwaterski]

so they can afford to pay a team of high priced lawyers to fight on their behalf all the time

Ever heard of contingent fee?

Re:His Plight Awaits all Americans in China

[Anonymous Coward]

Pertenant? No. Interesting? Yes.

Re:Moron

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn .. you sound highly intelligent. Why don't you list all of your inventions (I'm guessing it's ZERO) and how much money you made off them .. oh what? it's ZERO too ? GET A LIFE THEN.

Lifetime Patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Well congress has changed copyright to last much longer (79 years) and have automatic coverage without submitting renewal applications. It would seem it is time to change the patent system to have a lifetime of 80 - 100 years.

Re:Lifetime Patents

[devilspgd]

What does one have to do with the other?

Re:Moron

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody needs to mod this +1 Insightful.

Optic tech might not be here if he used a patent

[CaptRespect]

The CD/DVD technology might not be as popular if he did enforce a patent. If everyone had to pay him royalties for using his optical technology, then maybe they would have found a better/cheaper storage medium and made that the standard.

Before CD burners were cheap there were all kinds of other storage devices.

So maybe he wouldn't have made any money anyway either way.

fair use?

[Anonymous Coward]

so does this mean this is prior art?

give this man a reward/award

[MoFoQ]

To acknowledge this guy, we as /.'ers should set up a fund (I can donate a buck...even though xmas has left my funds slightly dry) and get him an award; Visionary Innovator or something. Hell, even name it after the guy. The Russell award.

If the /. effect has taught us anything, swarms of ppl donating even a buck can swell into millions if not billions, enough to set up a trustee organization/foundation that can rival the Nobel Foundation.

Re:give this man a reward/award

[liangzai]

No matter how much money you toss in, you can't rival the Nobel Foundation. It's a matter of prestige. The Nobel prize has been around for more than 100 years.

Re:give this man a reward/award

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't say that.....you might get Bill Gates interested in buying the Nobel Foundation just to prove that you can buy anything.

Re:give this man a reward/award

[theM_xl]

If we start now, the Russell prize will have a 100 years under it's belt by 2105. Assuming the fund is big enough, all it takes to last that long is time.

Re:give this man a reward/award

[atrizzah]

But, that would involve actually doing something, instead of posting redundant messages on a messageboard. Clearly you don't belong here.

Re:Moron

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone care to point out any times the patent system has helped to foster innovation or protected the little guy in the last 10 years?

Yes. I know someone who came up with an invention, patented it, started a company. He's doing pretty well for himself. Now it's not high tech, it's something that can be sold in a toy dept. Come along and try to get distribution at Walmart or Target. Negotiation is tough. It's why I don't like that there are just a couple large corporations that have stores everywhere that everyone goes too like Walmart and Best Buy. Competition for their limited shelf space is just evil. For most things they set the terms and you can take it or leave it.

At least internet shopping is growing up. That definitely helps. Drifting farther off-topic I make it a point to support the little local shops, even if I have to pay a couple more bucks or suffer a little inconvenience on occasion. I'm really greatful for alternatives to megacorporate hell (even though I hate to admit it, large organizations can be good for some things but in general I don't like em).

... never made a dime ...

[Greg@RageNet]

never made a dime

Yes, as an employee of Battelle I am sure he was compensated for his time working in their lab. He made whatever he negotiated as a salary.

Oh, nevermind, I fell off the corp-bashing bandwagon again. corp bad, tree good, unless the tree is a bush, then it's bad. Somebody get this guy some socialized healthcare or something!

-- greg

Not such a bad lot in life.

[dominion]

Let's be honest, this guy changed the face of computing. He knows that, now we know that. There are things better than financial reward, y'know.

Maybe he didn't make any money directly off of what he did, but neither did Jesus, Gandhi, or Linus.

Re:Not such a bad lot in life.

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction - Linus has made an awful lot of money from his work on Linux.

Gandhi's family are extremely well-off and powerful due to his contributions to the world. (So he didn't benefit, but his family has).

Jesus... well, okay, you've got one.

Many great innovators have suffered..

[TheCeltic]

Let's see...

Word Perfect (Practically put out of business by a monopoly that copied the technology)

Netscape (Ditto)

Real Networks (Ditto)

Lotus (Ditto)

MAC (Ditto)

IBM's OS2 (Ditto)

SUN (Ditto)

And who would the Monopoly be?

America needs to refocus on rewarding the innovators, not simply the immitators that have superior marketing skills. The thing that has made America the greatest in technology is innovation, not market share.

Re:Many great innovators have suffered..

[Anonymous Coward]

America needs to refocus on rewarding the innovators, not simply the immitators that have superior marketing skills. The thing that has made America the greatest in technology is innovation, not market share

Actually, you have it completely wrong, even down to the principles upon which this country was founded. The concepts that spawned the Constitution had been around since the Renaissance, but America was the first country to actually create something meaningful with them.

America is about doing, not talking. If you don't get your wonderful inventions out for the world to use, that's as good as not dreaming them up in the first place.

Accomplishments get rewarded, not ideas.

Re:Moron

[XopherMV]

Here's an idea that might be useful, lets make patents only available to people, not companies. That way they can protect inventors, and not be used to suck money out of people who actually innovate and make things.

Yeah, and then sweatshops in China will step in, steal the invention, undercut the price, and leave you just as poor as before.

The inventor in the first article was right about needing a large company to produce these inventions. If anything, they at least have the deep pockets available to sue any patent infringers in other countries. Without that money, any patents you make are worthless.

Re:Moron

[dosius]

What would be an idea is if someone patented something, and subcontracted to people with money to make it, he could have made money off it that way.

Moll.

RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

He states he didn't get a penny, but in the article it states that he was hired to develop this "far out idea."

I might be mistaken, but when you are hired by someone - they usually pay you a salery.

Anything you create while on the clock is property of the company you work for. If I program a nifty spam cathing program while at work, even though that isn't one of my projects, that program is property of the company. But this guy was hired to research this specific idea, as well as others.

What would be the point in a company hiring researchers and developers if the employees themself held the patents? What reason would Pfizer have to research any new drugs if the people they were paying to do the research could patent the IP and take it with them to their own startup company?

Sorry, the guy did get paid. It is obvious that if the companys involved didn't spend a significant amount of capital investing in his ideas, he could not have done this on his own.

Again, RTFA.

Re:RTFA

[Qzukk]

Sorry, the guy did get paid

Did he? Sounds more like the guy got had.

What if I came by and spotted your family heirloom dinner table, told you I recognized it as a very fancy piece of furniture and that I'd pay you $40,000? (Lets assume that you have no job, and therefore need the money more than you need the table.) Then it turns out it was actually the table George Washington ate from, and that I knew it at the time, and that its actually worth several million dollars?

You'd think you had been had too.

How is that different from a company looking for a person with particular ideas and offering that person a pittance (remember, this was pre-dot-com days, he probably drew $45-$60k/yr, and his pension would be a fraction of that) for ideas they clearly knew would be worth millions?

Re:RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

How is that different from a company looking for a person with particular ideas and offering that person a pittance (remember, this was pre-dot-com days, he probably drew $45-$60k/yr, and his pension would be a fraction of that) for ideas they clearly knew would be worth millions?

Knowledge is power. Get over it.

Re:RTFA

[ChickenAintDone]

Well I'd say it's one part knowledge, and three parts cutthroat business ethics.

Re:RTFA

[the angry liberal]

What if I came by and spotted your family heirloom dinner table, told you I recognized it as a very fancy piece of furniture and that I'd pay you $40,000? (Lets assume that you have no job, and therefore need the money more than you need the table.) Then it turns out it was actually the table George Washington ate from, and that I knew it at the time, and that its actually worth several million dollars?


WTF does this have to do with: "Here's $40k/year, now come up with something that will make me millions?" -- If he had invented it in his spare time, off company property, not using company resources at all, then I could see the debate. Rigth now, this just sounds like more /. self-victimization where the little guy is always right and the big company is always wrong.

He was contracted to do what he did and got paid for that. Perhaps once you guys get jobs and move out of your parents basements, you will understand the business world a bit better.

This is kind of like if one of the doctors involved with research of a cancer drug came out nearing the end of the patent life of said drug saying "I made this all by myself!", when it was, in reality, a collective of many doctors.

Re:RTFA

[nwbvt]

"What if I came by and spotted your family heirloom dinner table, told you I recognized it as a very fancy piece of furniture and that I'd pay you $40,000? (Lets assume that you have no job, and therefore need the money more than you need the table.) Then it turns out it was actually the table George Washington ate from, and that I knew it at the time, and that its actually worth several million dollars?"

Well for starters, that is a horrible analogy as according to the article, it sounds like he was doing pretty well. Assuming your 45-60k estimate is accurate, that was a lot of money back in the 60's. And there is no way you can argue the company they origionally sold the patent to (which then went bankrupt) knew that CDs and DVDs would become a major success story.

Plus in that case you would be paid, so the gp was correct.

Re:RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing no one really realises here is what the company he worked for does. Battelle is a non-profit corporation that was founded as a trust. It has a pretty cool mission of attempting to advance science and technology. They have traditionally done a lot of things other for profit companies wouldn't or couldn't. Don't get me wrong, they do try to bring in more money than they spend, to increase facilities, but they have to donate profits to charity.

As far as this guy goes, it would be nice if he was getting something else, but think of what happened. Battelle recognized that he might be on to something interesting, and gave him the resources to develop it. Not being product driven gave them the opportunity to do this. As a former employee, I would think he would have known this is how Battelle works.

Re:RTFA

[ytpete]

Yes, the company I work for owns everything I invent or produce on the job. But employees are rewarded for bringing success to the company. Tech firms usually give a bonus for any patent an employee secures on the job---that's how the business world works, right? So if you invent something that revolutionizes data storage and saves thousands of companies millions of dollars, you'd expect a pretty significant reward.

True, he doesn't own what he invented and he didn't do it all on his own (he admits this plainly in TFA). But in a capitalist world, he deserved more than the pittance he's getting.

Re:RTFA

[kesuki]

the guy invented the technology on a par with DVD-rom in 1974... And he had the ideas patented, and no matter how many expensive laywers sony and phillps had, this guy had the idea, and the patents first. And they settled for a cash sum, instead of some royalty.... This guys work could have easily lead to the DVD-movie playback way back in the mid 70s... Were talking before VHS ever had a chance to become popular they coulda had a working DVD-player if they'd actually hired the guy and paid the royalties, and used his technology.

Re:RTFA

[nwbvt]

" the guy invented the technology on a par with DVD-rom in 1974..."

Actually it was closer to 1965 when it was invented, something you would know had you RTFA.

"And he had the ideas patented, and no matter how many expensive laywers sony and phillps had, this guy had the idea, and the patents first."

No, his employer (Battelle) had the origional patents. And Sony and Phillips did not come about till much later, and was the subject of a patent lawsuit. More interesting facts you would know had you RTFA.

"This guys work could have easily lead to the DVD-movie playback way back in the mid 70s..."

Unlikely. There would be other developments that would also had been needed other than just a way to store data optically.

"they coulda had a working DVD-player if they'd actually hired the guy and paid the royalties"

Again, had you RTFA you would know the company that got the patents after the first company that bought them went bankrupt did hire him.

Re:RTFA

[DM9290]

I have a solution. Make it illegal for corporations to own intellectual property.

Considering that corporations are completely devoid of intellect it seems quite unnatural that corporations have any RIGHT to intellectual property.

At the very least this would force a corporation to continue to employ a human being in order to enjoy the monopoly granted by intellectual property.

What moral justification is there for a corporation to be able to OWN intellectual property?

Re:RTFA

[zors]

If he wanted more than he was guaranteed, then he should have negotiated a better contract. or started his own company.

I know, i know, that would not have been super easy and guaranteed him a steady paycheck. but if you want to make the big money, you have to take the big risks. Or take very small risks over an entire lifetime, like smart people do with the stock market. Or you can do what this guy did and just work for someone else. He may not be rich, but he isn't exactly living on the street.

Re:RTFA

[devilspgd]

The company invests potential millions in R&D to develop the product in question.

Re:RTFA

[frank_adrian314159]

... but if you want to make the big money, you have to take the big risks.

Yeah! Because the CEOs and exec VPs of a company like Phillips risk so much.

Re:RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

No, his employer (Battelle) had the origional patents.

Wrong. Take a look at every patent in existance in the US. It is not possible for a company to patent anything. Every patent has a human being's name on it. He had the "original" patent, his name is on it.

What then happens is that the company's employment contract stipulates that the company purchases all rights, exclusively, to that patent for (typically) $1.

Re:RTFA

[malkavian]

In the article, it explicitly mentions his take on that.
He saw the potential, but knew he couldn't afford to back the production/licensing of it at that time.
And rather than sit back and have patent he can use to screw the industry out of a viable technology, he chose to have a company produce it.

Re:RTFA

[LaCosaNostradamus]

What would be the point in a company hiring researchers and developers if the employees themself held the patents?

Er ... that crazy, nutty idea that you should pay for what the idea is worth.

The concept that a person owns an idea is as artificial as the concept that you own anything said person produces just because you pay him ... so the moral concept devolves into "who really came up with the innovation?". The answer is "the researcher AND the company" who did the work ... hence both should own the idea and profit thereby.

Any Republican will follow this argument ... however, it does lead to that nasty, logical result of actually paying non-elite individuals on the level of what the elite get now (i.e. paying researchers some of the millions that a patent allegedly gathers from market action). And that's where you trip over yourself in your posting.

If people were paid even ONE PERCENT of the net profits from the use of their morally-patented work (i.e. the work they essentially innovated), then the system would be much more fair, and would undermine any argument that liberal-leaners like myself might make. But corporations don't even want to pay that 1%. They want it all. And even when getting it all, they connive to change the law to continue getting it all, even more than all. 100% wasn't good enough. They want 110%. And that's just immoral, antisocial greed, Sir. Very immoral indeed.

Re:RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget that they probably risked a lot on their way up to those positions. They didn't graduate from college and become VPs right away.

Re:RTFA

[DM9290]

The company invests potential millions in R&D to develop the product in question.

There are many human millionaires. In fact, we justify their existence by suggesting that we need wealthy people in order to undertake certain projects which are beyond the means of contemplation to the average individual.

Corporations were the solution to the problem of 'how do you entice private individuals to build a railroad or a bridge, which would benefit society at large, when there is so much potential liability involved?'

enter: limited liability

that VAST majority of patents and copyrighted material DID NOT COST MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to create. And were invented by individuals and would be invented with or without limited liability.

Many of the remaining inventions were invented largely by public funds and should rightfully belong to the public.

You are taking the case of a small number of inventions in order to justify a malfunctioning system to the majority.

Is there a reason that all IP can not be owned either individually by a human being or jointly by multiple human beings.

Are there any inventions you suspect would not have been invented had it not been for corporate IP rights?

Corporations should only be granted rights out of some pressing need. corporations are not people, they have no feelings or opinions.

We don't give rights to animals, and animals are closer to human beings than corporations are.

I devised this idea only a few days ago, so I am interested in knowing its flaws. I'm not religious about it, but it seems to make sense.

If I am a millionaire (I'm not), what is to stop me from entering into a partnership with an inventor to do research on an invention. We can both jointly own the IP (we are human beings).

We can then create a corporation to actually sell and manufacture the product, and license the IP to the corporation.

Re:RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

I was referring to when he actually had it working boy. I don't consider a concept 'invented' until it works...

Re:RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, great editor skillz you show there - try including the next few words in that paragraph and see where your sarcasm gets you.

Re:RTFA

[the angry liberal]

If a person can own something, then why can't a group of people?

Why redefine what boils down to natural social interactions? Leave it alone and learn to fight in the current system.. ;)

Re:RTFA

[DM9290]

A corporation is not a group of people.

A corporation is property.

How is it natural for property to own property?

More importantly:

How can property be blaimed for wrongdoing? How can property be liable for damages?

What is the moral basis to justify limited liability?

I suspect that many, perhaps even most, corporations are owned by a single owner. They are just shields to protect the owners from taking responsibility for their mistakes. (and shifting the cost for those mistakes to the public)

Why redefine what boils down to natural social interactions? Leave it alone and learn to fight in the current system.. ;)

corporations are a natural social interaction? I beg to differ.

If you said communities are a natural social interaction, I would probably agree. Corporations on the other hand are a relatively new invention. They are purely a legal construction. Find me a single instance of a "natural corporation".

The current system needs to be fixed. My objective isn't to irradicate corporations. It is to have corporations fullfil a useful function rather than a harmful function.

I say, the concept of property owning property and limited liability is unnatural.

I am not putting forward the position that 'unnatural' means wrong. I am simply refuting your statement that corporations are 'natural'.

in the alternative:

even if they are natural, they are still harmful to people and should be put under better control.

Does nobody RTFA?

[Tiresias_Mons]

He developed the technology for a company he was working for, they owned the IP and paid him for his research while he was employed. That company then sold the rights to it to another company, who then went under in 1985 and was bought out by another company who successfully sued and won in defense of the patents on the technology. The only reason he didn't get paid off of that settlement was because he wasn't employed by the time it settled. He hardly got screwed, and didn't own the IP to begin with.

At least RTFA before flaming for Christ's sake.

company owned or inventor owned?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess the company he worked for owned this technology since he invented this as part of his job and using his company's money/equipment.

If you sell of the rights to something or do a work for hire, you have been paid in full for it.

Logical inconsistency where?

[mcc]

Let us ignore for a moment that Slashdot is a community of thousands upon thousands of people, so you're being rather silly if you're expecting a consistent opinion to be held between the comments all these different people. The presence of multiple conflicting opinions on a discussion site is what's supposed to happen, not a flaw.

If we for some reason assume there to be some kind of "patents are bad" party line on slashdot, it's certainly not out of place here. After all:

Situation A: A company is not responsible for a concept, but obtains a patent on it anyway. It then waits for others, who discovered the concept independently-- possibly before the patent owner did-- to put the patented conept into widespread use, and then begins to bully them with the patent. Public benefit from the concept is lessened, and the company gains a great deal of money from the patent that they have done nothing to deserve.

Conclusion: The patent system is not serving the purpose it should be serving.

Situation B: A person comes up with a nontrivial and useful invention. Using this person's work, others make billions of dollars from the invention, and an incalculable number of people benefit directly or indirectly. The person responsible for the invention does not recieve monetary recompension through the patent system for any of this.

Conclusion: The patent system is not serving the purpose it should be serving.

Sounds like a good candidate for a MacArthur award

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.macfdn.org/programs/fel/fel_overview.ht m

If research funding and the markets had worked...

[D4C5CE]

...not only would this inventor be famous (the word "rich" is rather secondary indeed), but also every one of us would have up to thirty years of digital (quite possibly even: video!) recordings of the key moments in our lives, lacking which therefore is yet another true tragedy. As it seems, one more case to prove that the intellectual property regime as we know it is not always the best way to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

Re:Moron

[Tooxs]

Didn't the article say that only Japan and Germany had special cases for inventors who work for corps.?

Re:If research funding and the markets had worked.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are seriously delusional if you believe that jumping to proof of concept prototype to large scale mass market acceptance can possibly take mere months. Well, if you dumped several billions into it I imagine the ramp up could be quite fast.

Discovision or laserdisc

[Anonymous Coward]

Discovision was demonstratedto the public in 1972, and it was in development during the sixties. I don't think this guy was the one who develop the technology.

http://www.cedmagic.com/history/discovision-1972 .h tml
or check wikipedia has dates of 1969
And I think phillips also had one of these around that time.
the company still is around they manage licensing www.discovision.com

I blame P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

See you greedy bastards, peer-to-peer sharing really does screw over the little guy.

Re:His Plight Awaits all Americans in China

[uhlume]

This isn't "Interesting", it's a troll, in a long series of trolls. Mods, get a clue.

Whine, whine, whine ...

[Anonymous Coward]

...from the homeland of robber barons, corporate kleptocracy and wars for oil. How your people suffer! It brings tears to my eyes.

Re:Whine, whine, whine ...

[Anonymous Coward]

What!? I'm an American you insenstive clod!

Inventor was the company, not the person

[AHumbleOpinion]

Case 2: Inventor creates well-deserved patent which leads to multi-billion dollars of business for many companies and does not receive a cent of royalties, due to bad/greedy decisions by corporate management. Opinion: Well-deserved patents good - companies greedy/stupid. Where is this logical inconsistency again?

Well we could begin with the fact that you completely misrepresent the starting conditions. Did you read the article? He did not develop the technology on his own, this was not a garage inventor. He was an employee doing research on company time on company equipment. The company, Battelle, owned his work and they got just as "screwed" as he did. Your "bad/greedy" characterization is naive. Good ideas are not enough, you need the resources to turn the ideas into products, and some good luck. A more realistic characterization was that the idea was too far ahead of its time.

Never made a dime?

[siljeal]

never made a dime

Is that so? Was he working for free? I would assume that he was being paid for his work, and so I don't really see the problem. That he could have milked the system is really just an assumption that's built on the silly notion that every producer (especially foreign producers) will honor your patent, use the technology covered in the patent and pay fees. And we know that this is not always the case. The companies could avoid the patented technology or decide to use the technology and take the legal risks of not paying up.

a page of history for him...

[atom_pheer]

but i don't really see what he has lost

write your dreams down; let the world make them real for you

i think that down inside he feels better than, say, bill gates

How Odd

[djSpinMonkey]

When I read the title of this article, I thought, "Oh, how nice that the inventor is actually getting a little something. That's unusual." My cynicism is now properly reinforced.

Re:Moron

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhhh, you do realize that more than two people post on slashdot and that, for that reason, it's not unusual to see opinions that confict with each other.

The company did patent it ...

[AHumbleOpinion]

The company did patent it, Mr. Russell was an employee not some independent inventor working out of his garage:

"Battelle recognized Russell's creativity and gave him time and a laboratory to develop his ideas, including a far-out system that would use a laser to read digitized music. In hindsight, Battelle let Russell's patents go for a song. It licensed them to a venture capitalist who formed a public company in 1980 to market the technology. That company ran out of money in 1985, and the patents went to a startup in Toronto, which hired Russell. It sued Sony, Philips and music publishers for licensing fees and royalties on CD technology, but Russell was let go before settlements were reached, and he never got a share."

And a nice guy too.

[Darth Muffin]

And heck a heck of a nice guy and interesting to talk to also. I met him a few years ago at a friend's holday party--he's their landlord and neighbor. We had a mini geek-fest in the corner comparing our ipaqs.
When I heard (from someone else in the room) that he invented the CD, I was just in awe. Very cool.
He's into many other things also. He may not be rich like he deserves to be, but I can say he's living comfortably (he owns at least 2 properties that I know of) and is happy.

RIAA Target

[kmahan]

Now the RIAA knows who to blame(sue) for all of the evil evil CDs/DVDs that have enabled high-quality (digital) copying. He even admits to having downloaded (off the air) television shows (wonder if he skipped the commercials?) and also having ripped music.

Note to the humor impared: the above was intended to be humorous.

Good candidate for the Millenium Award

[buddahfool]

Tim Berners-Lee recieved a Finnish Technology Award Foundation award to recognize his development of HTML. (1 million dollars)
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3 341741
I believe the part of the purpose of the award is to compensate those who benifitted the common good but did not make money off of it.
http://www.technologyawards.org/

I wonder how people get nomiated?

This is normal

[carl0ski]

He was layed off from the company who owned his patent on the technology so blame them not SONY and certainly not RIAA but the story sounds really suss he hypothesised that movies could be stored on it i very much doubt any1 in the sixties would have thought even dreamed movies/film in digital was at all possible at the time. he has a glass plates that sported his technology hope it does infringe any RIAA copyrights they will knock down his door only non John-doe case in years

Tech Trivia Tidbit

[musselm]

My favorite paragraph:

"Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, music aficionados went to extreme lengths to get high-quality sound from records. Russell was the sort who used cactus needles on his record player; they had to be hand-sharpened after each use, but the sound was better and they wouldn't wear out albums as fast as metal needles."

That's what I'd call extreme lengths, alright.

no

[geekoid]

what this proves is you shuoldn't sign away your IP rights.
And when someone does infringe, you go after them. If he had taken them to court when he first had the chanes, odds are you would have gotten a settlement.

"The research for patents is expensive and time-consuming. If your next meal depends on coming up with another idea and selling it, you probably aren't going to have either time or money to spend."

not nearly as bad as it was 15 years ago.
It is not expensive to file a patent, so you can get close to what you are looking for using there online search, and then submit. If it fails, then they'll let you know.
A hell of a lot cheaper then an IP attorney.

IMO what need to happen is:
a) There should be a relative way and method to submit prior art.

b) Get more patent officials. Charge 10 times the current rate to renew patents to pay for it.

c) disallow software patents.

d) develop even easier ways to do patent searches onling.

e) disallow corporations from holding patents.

f) set a law that patents can only be assigned to someone besides the inventor for 7 years.

Yea right....

[WizardRahl]

"I didn't really expect I was going to make a lot of money, because I recognized early on it was going to take a big company to put this all together and get it out on the market, because it was a revolutionary thing," Russell said, "and you don't just do revolutionary things of that order without enormous support and that I was going to lose my position no matter what."

I'm sure Bill Gates and Steve Jobs felt the same way. *rolls eyes*

Re:Look who posted the article: michael

[Anonymous Coward]

Jackass. Any market with patents is BY DEFINITION not a free market. Patents are a state-enforced 20 year monopoly. An anti-patent stance is Libertarian, laissez-fair capitalist, certainly not Leftist (in the american left=socialist sense).

It was never the light bulb alone

[westlake]

Edison and his team did more than invent a light bulb.

Think about what is required to generate and distribute electric power on a commercial scale, about what is needed to make electric power safe for use in the home, in business, in industry.

You need to design and set standards for power stations, overhead lines, household wiring, insulation, fuses, plugs, sockets and switches, relays, motors and god alone knows how much else.

Remember it all has to work with the materials and manufacturing techniques available in 1880. Remember too that your residential customers will have no understanding that electricity can kill or ignite fires, no sense of the danger in something as simple as touching a contact.

You will need to train "electricians," and "electrical engineers," skilled trades and professions that scarcely exist in the modern sense before Edison.

Re:It was never the light bulb alone

[niktesla]

Think about what is required to generate and distribute electric power on a commercial scale, about what is needed to make electric power safe for use in the home, in business, in industry.

And yet it was not Edison who did this, but rather another forgotten inventor - Nikola Tesla. Edison was for a DC power distribution system which would have cost a lot more by requiring a generation plant every block or so. Tesla developed the polyphase AC distribution system from the ground up: generators, motors, transformers, etc. Tesla is the real father of the modern electrical power system.

Re:It was never the light bulb alone

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh. Tesla really isn't fogotten. I mean, were there any seminal cock rockers named after Edison???

Violence and Brilliance

[Anonymous Coward]

In this world, to get "paid" for an invention, you have to be as violent as you are brillinat. Violence and brillaince don't seem to imbue the same person very often.
Even the inventors of weapons usually invent for the goal of lasting peace.
No, law, patents, politics... these are the domains of the violent, the ignorant, and the stupid. Extortion, pillaging, rape, theivery and open combat; the bulk of humanity's ever present leagacy have simply moved into court rooms, board rooms and press rooms.
Those who cannot create have always been content to use their collective and individual might to steal from those who can.

Re:Violence and Brilliance

[js290]

From Maj. General Smedley Butler's War is a Racket:

But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.

If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war -- even the munitions makers.

I'm sure the chicken hawks will find a way to discredit his service...

Re:Moron

[geekoid]

what people like Jim Russel need is a partner.
That way someone is doing the leg work while Jim creates.
Of course, you need a lawyer, and enough common sense not to give him more then half. Also, have an agreement thats tates he can not sell his half to anyone but Jim Russel.

Patents are easy.

[geekoid]

sheeesh, you can do the searches on line, an individual can get patents fopr a few hundred dollars.

however, My grandfather used to get his ideas noterized, mail it to himself, stick it into another envolpe, sigh accros the flap and them mail that to himeslf.

Then he would go to corporation and sell his ideas.
Made some good money, and used that to prove prior art on one occasion.

the kicker is

[geekoid]

when someone retires from a state job, then contracts for that exact same job.
or worse, when they take an 'early retirement' and do it.

Just bad business decision

[servognome]

This guy had a dream job where they pay you a salary, and give you access to resources and all they ask is for you to "just be inventive." Just throw this on the same pile as all the things that came out of Xerox PARC that didn't generate millions for the original inventor.

Who is the jackass here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jackass. Any market with patents is BY DEFINITION not a free market. Patents are a state-enforced 20 year monopoly. An anti-patent stance is Libertarian, laissez-fair capitalist, certainly not Leftist (in the american left=socialist sense).

Fuck you you fucking retard cocksucker, michael has a long history of corporation-bashing if you've been paying attention while michael is on duty. I doubt michael can even spell "libertarian" much less live up to its ideals. michael is very pro-censorship and VERY pro-punishment of successful corporations and rich folks, likely stemmed from his own failures in his worthless life. Buy a clue from your slashbot pimp before you fuck up my comment with a reply that drips the cum of ignorance because you decided to blow CmdrTaco. Go fuck a rodent you fucking idiot.

Re:Who is the jackass here?

[kurzweilfreak]

Well since you put it that way, I'm convinced.

Re:Who is the jackass here?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Fuck you you fucking retard cocksucker"

Well that explains why your post was nonsensical. You're obviouly an angry, pimple-faced, little 13 year old who can't believe someone would disagree with your perfect little coporate world that you've been programmed since birth to believe in.

Grow up.

Re:Who is the jackass here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Saldy, he's probably 25 years old, but he's still angry and pimple-faced. And he still has attitude problems.

1984

[Anonymous Coward]

In June, 1985 I quit work for a major unnamable midwestern aerospace defense organization. For the preceding year I led a team measuring any device or material related to the space environment. Of the three technicians assigned to me as engineer, I saw one only on occaision. Later I found out where he was.

He had been secretly re-assigned to a project which utilized photgraphic film on a 10-12" disk, to which could be written ~1Gbyte data. write once, read only, as it was known. Of course, that could then be contact copied. When I learned of the project, and where my technician was (while I was paying him from my budget) I inquired as to why this wasn't something going into immediate production. This was, after all, pre-386! Drives were in the 20-meg range, and ram in the k's! And why was I paying for a tech I never saw?

Re:Moron

[techwonk]

Does anyone care to point out any times the patent system has helped to foster innovation or protected the little guy in the last 10 years?

I remember reading about a guy named Robert Kearns back in the mid 90's and his struggle with patent law. Kearns is credited with designing (and patenting) variable speed controls for auto windsheild wipers but he was overlooked by the auto manufacturers since the 50s (And from what I hear also being one hell of a suave guy...he shot out his own eye with a champagne cork on his wedding night). I could go on explaining my fuzzy memory of the whole story, but instead I pulled this off engineerguy.com:

"Now, wiper blades interested auto makers because wipers helped sell cars. In the late 1950s several cars began sporting two blades that swept in parallel across the windshield, replacing the single blade that created a huge Vee in the middle of the windshield. This new two blade system attracted buyers, and by the 60s every car had them. The next step was intermittent operation. The key is making a cheap timer for the wipers. And here is where Kearns' work comes in. The auto companies had developed a mechanical contraption with some twenty-nine moving parts. Kearns design by contrast was elegant: He used an electric motor with a timer to control the wiper. The result: Four parts, only one of which even moved. But it seemed so obvious that auto makers thought Kearns ' patents would be null and void.

So they built cars with these wipers, but didn't pay Kearns. When he heard about this he bought a wiper and carefully took it apart: He saw all the essential parts of his 1964 patent. So he sued nearly every major auto maker. He sued for one point six billion dollars - this was about 500 million for his lost profits and more than a billion in damages. The first auto maker he sued offered him thirty million dollars to settle out of court. But to Kearns accepting the settlement meant that it was OK to steal inventions. His case when to trial after a twelve year delay - twelve years in which Kearns' single minded pursuit of justice lost him his wife and broke his health. After a three week trial the jury returned a verdict: The auto maker indeed infringed on Kearns patents, but they awarded him $5 million dollars - a far cry from the 1.6 billion he wanted.

So, the next time your wipers flash across your windshield pause for a moment and think of Bob Kearns and his struggle for justice."

I understand, however, that he had eventually recieved much more than 5 mil. through other settlements with ford and chryser...

It was invited in the 50's by David Paul Gregg

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovision

he even patented the optical disc thing. Wich later became laserdisc.

Re:Slashdot swings both ways - NOT!

[quarkscat]

The entire issue of patents can boil down to
just a few generally accepted (/.) statements:

(1) basic hardware patents are cool -- and
probably far too short in duration.
Nations that engage in patenting the
application of innovation "shotgun
method" in order to cover all possible
future uses are not. (Japan comes to mind
here.)

(2) software patents, particularly as implimented
in the USA, are predominantly un-cool, and
destructive. The entire notion of "prior
art" has been abandoned by the USPTO.
(Whatever happened to the concept "We stand
upon the shoulders of giants." ?) Almost
all software patents fall into the "absurd"
category.

Contradictory /. Concensus....

[kevlar]

Red Alert! We have a major moral breakdown of the /. Intellectual Property Concensus! It is immoral to have both the ability to own intellectual property AND profit from ones invention!! So what if he invented optical storage! He invented it for the betterment of society, not for his own monetary gain...

Patents

[Mark_MF-WN]

Patents definitely ARE bad. It's a nice idea, but it doesn't work out in the real world. Like the most famous well intentioned idea -- communism -- it does nothing more than create an oppressive oligopoly.

Re:Patents

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

No. The patent system is bad. Nothing that bad about patents themselves. Many good inventions would probably never see the light of day if it weren't for patents.

Re:Patents

[Mark_MF-WN]

Ahh, well played. It is indeed the patent system that is problematic, not to mention the application of patents to fields where they are clearly not appropriate (such as genetics, software, and business methods).

Re:Simple fix - of the wrong thing

[bjsyd70]

You are fixing the wrong thing!!!

He made a fine living. He is bummed that he is not rich.

The only thing worth fixing here, is the inconvenience to Sony and Philips this bunch created.

Sony and Philips would have created the CD with less hassle if this guy had never existed.

We live in a world of enourmous value, and the most valuable things are not anyone's property.

Perhaps we should give 5 cents on each CD in English to the creator of English.

Oblig Simpsons crap

[bryn93]

The dude should look on the bright side: Professor Frink never made a penny from those hamburger earmuffs, which in the grand scheme of things, I think are a little bit more important than optical drives.

Re:Sorry, no injustice here (NOT !)

[quarkscat]

Unfortunately, that is NOT the way corporations
work (at least in the USA). If you invent some-
thing while working for your employer, then it
is owned by the employer. However, many/most
USA companies that hire you to be creative also
expect that anything you work on on your own
time also belongs to them, regardless of whether
the innovation/invention is work-related or not.

Also, when you decide to leave the employ of that
company (by choice or not), they might still own
any innovation/invention of yours for 1 year
afterwards, let alone control who you might
want to work for. Try reading the fine print
in the next Non-Compete Agreement you are asked
to sign, with the assistance of a good lawyer.

You might just be surprised to find that the
employer even has first rights to your offspring.

troll has mod points!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:His Plight Awaits all Americans in China (Score:0, Troll)
by uhlume (597871) on Tuesday December 28, @06:44PM (#11204229)
(http://uhlume.livejournal.com/)
Thi s isn't "Interesting", it's a troll, in a long series of trolls. Mods, get a clue.
[ Reply to This ]

Starting Score: 1 point
Moderation -1
100% Troll
Extra 'Troll' Modifier 0
Total Score: 0

Re:Moron

[Anonymous Coward]

Confused? Don't be. Just apply this simple formula:

How about this:

"GPL" IP protecting freedom : GOOD

"usual" IP restricting freedom : BAD

Now that's easy.

He was an employee, not an indy!

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

""This poor guy invented optical storage (CDs, DVDs) and never made a dime. Another case of an idea before its time and cheating a man of his due."

Uh, save the pity party ... This isn't like the guy with the intermittent wiper technology that the auto makers ripped off. He was ON SALARY and his employer financed his research!

Like all employees, he probably had an employment agreement where he assigned patents to the employer, and maybe even got bonuses for each patent. If so, he was not eligible for a cut of the settlement, because he had already assigned the rights.

Thanks

[ghost509]

Thanks slashdot for this heart-warming end of year story :-)

#include "life.h"

Re:His Plight Awaits all Americans in China

[Anonymous Coward]

When the chinese economy improves they'll stop doing this.

After all the Chinese didnt get any royalties for inventing the compass, rocketry, or gunpowder did they?

When you are a dirt poor country you can't have tinkerers .. the guy who invented the CD tech was working for some highly funded companies and had access to equipment such as oscilloscopes etc. back then.

Inventor of optical storage?

[AndyChrist]

I think the patent on writing expired a long time ago.

I ain't gonna cry for this little whiner

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should he expect to get anything? He was a slave working for a company. The company is the rightful owner of his invention, he's just a stupid poor scab who got picked off. Cry me a river. This is how it works in the Ownership Society.

Re:If research funding and the markets had worked.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ignoring that, we are beginning to see that CD-R media has an effective lifespan of about a decade, maybe less.

He *did* get paid

[Anonymous Coward]

He did the work for Batelle - as an employee. He got a pay check, and assigned the patents to his employeers. Batelle paid for the lab, the equipment, his time, his benifits, his pension. In return, they got the patents.

That's how it works, kids. That's how it works.

This happened to my grandfather...

[snower1313]

My grandfather invented copy machine duplexing (copying a double sided sheet of paper) and only got a dollar from xerox for getting the patent.

Now you know..

[Anonymous Coward]

..how poor Daryl McBride feels.

Shed a tear for poor Daryl, won't you?

Re:Good, bad, ugly.. Add a Grandfather Clause Then

[Anonymous Coward]

The existing Law might be okay. It just needs to be amended. Adding a grandfather clause that would be retroactive to include anyone & everyone who had contributed to the final marketable product. The company selling the device wouldn't have to pay it, not really. Once COMPILED, all the previous people {including the company employees} would split an add-on fee. I know it won't be done, but it is a shame on America til something is done. You know, Inventors and creative people do have families, and they should be recompensed for the Inventor's Work... not just get a pat on the back. I have 10 inventions now but can't do anything with them. Space-age stuff. What th hell do I do with them? Give em away? I've done that. I've given away plenty. I did so because Mankind needed them. These other ones I'm holding back til the Laws change. One is an engine that overcomes Gravity... 3 days ago as I negotiated a curve near home, I came face to face with a new white car in my lane. Be a real shame to lose an anti-gravity engine to a Head-on eh? You people in charge of changing the f'ing Law better hurry. I may not be around for long, and I doubt there's anyone else gonna figure out this engine besides me for a VERY LONG TIME. This is not -NOT- a gamble you want to lose.

Re:Yes, I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 10:48PM, shouldn't you be sucking your corporate master's dick right now?

Re:Moron

[End11]

Here's an idea that might be useful, lets make patents only available to people, not companies.

Wouldn't that just destroy the incentive companies have for hiring these innovative people, thus leavin them without a job?

Same idea as Punch Cards, right?

[MmmDee]

Or did I miss something? Herman Hollerith got a footnote in computer history books, but didn't get rich. Just goes to show that we all piggy back ideas off of others and the whole patent craziness going on needs some controls.

Honest work for honest salary?

[stienman]

Another case of ... cheating a man of his due.

What exactly was his due? What's wrong with the current system that allows a company or society to cheat a man of his due?

He was paid for his work. Just because his invention (and in particular only this one) made it big doesn't necessarily mean that he is 'due' any more than an inventor who's invention made it 'small', if it made it at all.

I don't understand this mentality. Should we revere the person who came up with QWERTY just because 99% of the keyboards in the US use his layout? Is Edison due more than what he got because there are literally billions of his lightbulb in use?

I don't understand why one might think that a person who contracts with another person or company should be given more compensation after the work is done and the contract completed. I know it's done all the time, especially in Hollywood, but I see it as a sign of selfish, self centered individuals. This is one of the reasons a handshake simply isn't good enough these days.

-Adam

Re:Yes, I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than rebut your stupid and pointless straw man arguments for the umpteenth time, I'm am simply going to sit here and laugh.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Idiot.

NO

[tqft]

...if you do (a?)the TV station will go after him for his money.

RTFA - he copied a TV show onto a glass platter to show it could be gone.

The man was paid to invent technology to demonstrate copyright infringement.

reminds me of the laser

[Daktaklakpak]

In his book, "How the Laser Happened" Charles Townes (the inventor of the maser (microwave laser)) has a chapter about the patent games that he went through. The gist of it was that most original inventions are too ahead of their time for the original patents to make money. It's the subsidiary but later patents that may involve only minor modifications that really bring in the dough. Case in point: Jay Gould, another scientist who claimed that he should own the patent for the laser fought for it in court for over a decade before it was awarded him. Turns out, his initial failures to obtain the patent caused him to make a lot more money than he would have otherwise.

It seems that the first player in a new field isn't the one who makes the biggest bucks off its original ideas. For example, if this whole peer to peer thing ends up making money somehow, we'll all point at Napster and say they were first, but such -and-such company is actually the one making all the money.

Re:Moron

[dabigpaybackski]

Then we could finally get those flying cars they have been showing in movies about the future for the last hundred years.

You're closer to the truth than you realize. There is a multitude of hobbyists toying around with primitive anti-gravity technology. Here's one article among many to describe the phenomenon. As for large-scale commercial applications, well, that's going to require serious investment from the likes of Hyundai or Antonov. Meanwhile, we can keep dreaming.

Re:and if he would have patented it - troll

[bit01]

and sold the rights, /. would curse him

Some /.'ers would be unhappy. /. isn't a monoculture like some companies I could name.

---

Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.

anticompetetive IP

[Anonymous Coward]

They buy the idea for tons of money and put it on a shelf because it's a competing technology they'd have to retool/structure to produce.

Lessons Learned

[PingPongBoy]

Do not stop at one invention. A business that hires someone to invent or solve difficult problems is taking a big risk and therefore deserves rights and ownership. The inventor has to find a new opportunity. Anyone who is hired for the purpose of invention ought to have the qualifications for tackling new problems.

If you are working at a non-inventive job but you see a better way to achieve a purpose, take care of yourself. You will be paid regardless of whether you do it with an invention or by brute force. If you want to enrich yourself with your new potential for bargaining leverage, apply a strategy. Test out elements of your invention without revealing it. Consider starting your own business or ask for either a promotion or equity.

Do not underestimate what an invention means. Investigate its potential. Consider possibilities.
Be ready to invest a lot of time and energy though - it can be a long way from concept to market appeal. If an idea is revealed too early, a large company may spend megabucks to fully develop the idea in such a way that it retains full ownership.

The poorman inventor may improve his/her competitive position by partnering with experts required for developing a product, especially by finding experts who have no dominance in the target market, but share a common vision. In this group all inventors will more more financially appreciated.

Don't be afraid to invent. In time, computers will show enormous levels of creativity, and people will have to up the ante. Human inventiveness is alive and well! This state of affairs brings us inexorably to AI. It is distinctly possible that the assumption of limited resources and the requirement to allocate them forces the division of said resources in a way that the most inventive beings, machine or flesh, receives the most resources. In this scenario, incredibly creative machines may emerge and burn through gargantuan amounts of raw materials in order to achieve all kinds of higher ideals while those who are less smart are left with scraps. However, some of these higher ideals may involve the fostering of increased inventiveness of any intelligent being resulting in an enjoyable standard of living for everyone.

Write a book.

[alex_ware]

Seriously he should write a book about his story for non-nerds and get it published.

1.Get your innovative idea stolen.
2.Try to get paid.
3.Write book.
4.PROFIT!!!

How much did J.V. Atanasoff get?

[Anonymous Coward]

John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry invented the digital computer at Iowa State University during 1937-42. (Atanasoff got his BS at the University of Florida as did I, GO GATORS.) Their computer, the ABC, was developed prior to ENIAC, etc. They even were finally awarded the patent on it in 1973. However, they got nothing.

See:
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive. shtml

Paradigms Lost

[Genial Generalist]

The basic problem is a cultural unwillingness to adopt new ideas. Hundreds of books have been written on "paradigm" shifts. The corollary to this is that the more complex an invention, the more difficult it will be to implement and obtain any commercial credit. Had Russell invented the "clapper" he might have seen some royalties. The day of the garage inventor coming up with a major invention that changes the world is about on par with hitting the lottery, given the structure of the social / legal environment. Our societies' process for invention is established around corporate, government and university labs to initiate "new" inventions only in their narrow lanes of expertise.

Just goes to show....

[lucason]

IP rights and their protection don't actually defend the inventors, nor do the defend the research labs that invest.

They protect the venture capitalists and ruling industry giants.

They stiffle inovation by limiting the right to improve on old and use new technology to its full potential.

What Battelle was like

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work for the US government years ago and my office had a contract with Battelle from about 1988-1990, plus or minus a year. We foolishly paid them about $150,000 a year at the time to provide one guy on site to work full time as a Unix systems administrator. Also, once or twice a year, they would send a guy down to work for a week if we needed an operating system upgrade. The guy who worked full time told us he was making $35,000, so even if you assign a crazy value to the 2 weeks maximum work we got out of the guy they sent down to work for us, they cleared over $100,000 a year of pure profit on the contract. Needless to say, once our manager finally realized they could pay a government employee a government wage to do the same job, the contract was not renewed, at huge savings to the government. I'm not implying that Battelle was unethical or doing anything any other company wouldn't have done, but we sure didn't feel like we were getting a lot for our money. The full time employee they gave us was very weak. To give you an example, he wrote a shell script that needed to test for null strings and his test was to append a zero to the front of a string before he tested it. If the string equalled only 0, then he knew he had a null string. The idea of testing for a null string itself ("") was beyond his comprehension.

I briefly made friends with an employee at their Columbus office and she told me that Battelle paid pretty low salaries and they had difficulty keeping good people. Most people who worked for them would use it to get some marketable skills and then leave for other companies. The guy in the article may have been smart, but he was probably one of those guys who didn't care anything about money. Battelle basically let him play all day because they probably weren't paying him all that much and maybe he would get lucky and invent something they could make a lot of money at. I can't say I'm real surprised that Battelle saw no use for his technology.

Just a small factor of 1,000, unoriginal

[Ancient_Hacker]

it's not clear from the article, but I suspect Philips had to shrink the process by a factor of at least 1000, plus develop the complex interleaved storage format, plus develop the mass-production process, plus develop inexpensive readers, plus develop the inexpensive LSI decoder IC's. At least the work of 100 other scientists and technologists, certainly at least 20 other patents on the various processes and devices.

Given all that, what would be an equitable payment for that original guy? Pretty low, I'd guess.

BY THE WAY, the old IBM corp had a big optical disk they used for dictionary storage waaay before this "original" guy's invention, circa 1960.

Re:Moron

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Wouldn't that just destroy the incentive companies have for hiring these innovative people, thus leavin them without a job?

I don't think so. Not if it were still legal to contract to give something like 90% of the profit from said invention to a company that funds your research. The trick is that no inventor should be able to give away all their rights to an invention. This has been tried with intellectual property in several countries, resulting in all art being created on contract so that the original creator did not have rights to start with. This too must be protected against. If an inventor is guaranteed at least 1% of the profit from his inventions, then they will at least make something. Isn't that what patents are supposed to be about? Shouldn't we be protecting inventors and encouraging them to invent?

Please, PLEASE mod parent down! -99 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice try there, bonch, er, rd_syringe, er, Overly Critical Guy. If you're going to post an AC to your own post you should at least try to make it sound plausible. Moron.

Re:Please, PLEASE mod parent down! -99 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my God. The poster DID get a Slashcode bitchslap. I now hate Michael.

Good job, fucker!

Re:Moron

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

If you read the article you would know that they mention that no one could see the potential of his work, and no one was interested in it. Also, since the invention was owned by his lab, and then by a start-up (of which he was a part) he did not have much say to begin with.

Re:Moron

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Well, yours is the best example so far. After a protracted court battle, someone made money 40 years ago. I'm sure there are more recent examples, but the fact that no one has knows of or has mentioned any is really indicative of how broken the system is.

He's full of shit

[trailerparkcassanova]

The laserdisc was the precursor to the compact disc and was invented in 1958. Philips and MCA demonstrated a laserdisc in 1972.

who's yer baddy?

[PMuse]

Scientist gets lab funded. Scientist gets paid salary, then pension at x% of salary. -- This is good.

Consumers get recorded music in convenient format. -- This is good.

Research labs make $1 million. -- This is OK.

The patents have expired. -- This is good.

Phillips, Sony, RIAA, et al. make $100s of billions selling discs and music. -- This, presumably, is bad.

What bad thing did the patents do in this story?

While we're tripping over our prejudices trying to answer that, ponder this: how would the story have gone if no patents had existed? The answer is that only one thing changes -- the lab doesn't get paid the $1 million.

I worked on the first ever CD-ROM.

[sbaker]

I worked in the Philips research labs where the very first CD-ROM was made. We were working on designs for home computers with friendly user interfaces (touch screens, 256 colour graphics displays, GUI's - remember, this was before the Mac and before the invention of the mouse). We realised that these computers would need to have lots of reference 'books' online and therefore needed useful amounts of storage (more than the 20Mb hard drives and sub-megabyte floppies that were around at the time). We took a pre-production prototype Philips Audio CD player and (with the help of the audio group) hacked it so we could read the digital data into the 68000-based 'home computer' we'd designed for the project (which was called "C.H.R.I.S" - I forget what it stood for).

The very first CD-ROM we made (as a demo) was an interactive dictionary - with pictures, sound and text. There were hyper-links you could touch to link any word that was on-screen with it's definition, and buttons to have it speak the word to you. All of the nouns in the dictionary had pictures. (Our team's secretary read all of the words for us - she had a really nice voice!)

We didn't have the effort to do the entire dictionary - so we only did the letter 'O' (I have no recollection of why 'O' was chosen).

My work was in the authoring system - I wrote a paint program for making the pictures. (Remember that the only commercial paint software ran on custom Quantel hardware and cost a small fortune! If you wanted to paint digital pictures, you pretty much had to build your own hardware *and* software from scratch.)

We had a commercial artist come in and paint Oafs, Oak trees, Ocelots and so on.

We had severe problems with storage. It took a lot of state-of-the-art 20Mb hard drives to store even the data we had for the letter 'O'! The results were tranferred to 9 track tape and sent to the VAX in the Philips audio group which controlled the CD mastering system. They pressed 50 CD's for us because we were concerned that the error rates on those early systems would be so high as to make most of the copies unusable. As it turned out, all 50 CD's seemed to work.

As far as I know, not a single one of those first CD-ROMs still exists.

Anyway - none of us who worked on that project earned millions for it. We didn't expect to because that's what they pay you for.

However, I'd *REALLY* liked to have had one of those CD-ROMs.

You have a choice.

[sbaker]

If you want to work in research and invent things for a living, you have a choice.

You can try to work by yourself, using your own equipment - patent whatever you come up with and earn money from the licensing/royalties. You take an enormous risk. Since the VAST proportion of inventions never make it into products, the odds are very good that you'll be poor for your entire life, scraping an existance. There is however, a very small chance that one of your inventions will earn you billions of dollars and make you a household name. ...OR...

You can work for a company who pays you a steady salary whether your inventions turn out to be useful or not. You'll never be rich - but you'll never be wondering how to pay the next bill either. That company takes all the risk for you - and in order to do that, they have to take all of the big earnings too.

On the average, you'll probably earn about the same either way - $100k per year for 40 years is $4M - that's probably about what you'd earn from the one or two great ideas an average researcher might have during their career.

But you don't get to have it both ways.

If you are supremely confident in your ability to come up with a great idea once a decade or so (and get it to market - which is definiely non-trivial) - then DON'T WORK FOR A BIG COMPANY.

But if you are risk-averse and you'd like to have a steady monthly income - go work for a research lab somewhere and live a moderately comfortable life, knowing full well that you may invent something earth-shattering and merely end up as a footnote in the history books.

You have a choice.

We were working with this at NYIT back in 1980

[Thagg]

Back in 1980, Tracy Peterson was working with me at the NYIT Computer Graphics Laboratory. He had built, with funding from Alex Schure, a digital sound facility at the lab that was state-of-the-art for the time.

The heart of the system was a SoundStream digital audio box, that would do the D-to-A and A-to-D conversions in real time, with very low noise. Again, for the day, it was revolutionary.

We were working with a system that recorded data optically onto cards of the 3x5 for factor mentioned and shown in the article. It was extremely cool. The data was recorded in the same circular arcs as show in the photo, so I have to believe it was the same system.

The recorder and players both kept the media still, and scanned a laser across the surface -- unlike the ubiquitous CD and DVD systems today that move the media and keep the head relatively still. There was an ingenious system of five prisms that whirled above the data card, that scanned the laser across the surface in an arc of 72 degrees or so. When the beam reflected from one prism hit the edge of the card, the beam was shifted to the next prism.

I believe that the whole card was slowly shifted into and out of the player as it went from track to track, much like the laser is shifted along a rail in a CD player.

Apparently the biggest problem was registration -- getting the card to align as precisely as required and getting each of the five prisms aligned perfectly.

It was interesting technology, but the CD mechanism is much simpler, and probably should have won out (as it did).

Thad Beier

Re:Moron

[Morlark]

Yeah, and then sweatshops in China will step in, steal the invention, undercut the price, and leave you just as poor as before.

The problem isn't with sweatshops in foreign countries stealing inventions. That's just one of those things, it's a tough world, there's not much that you can do about it. The problem is when these foreign products are imported into the US. This is illegal, and yet it still goes on. Thus the problem is reduced to one of insufficient legislation. It would be a simple enough thing to introduce legislation to make it impossible to make a profit on illegal copies, but it hasn't been done. Why?

What do smart inventors do?

[Kim0]

A smart inventor is smart enough to know that he will not be rewarded for doing excellent work that the company can profit from. What is the smart thing to do in circumstances like that?

To maximise earnings, make the company believe that you are valuable and on the verge of a major breakthrough all the time, and make it difficult for others to take over by obfuscating and misrepresenting the results. Never actually finish the project, as that will make you unemployed. And if you get unemployed anyway, wait out the contract, and work on the same thing for another company, or by yourself.

What would the world be like if smart inventors did this? It would be full of interesting projects that never completes, or just barely work but is soon taken over by a better competitor. And this is indeed exactly what we see happening in the world.

Kim0

Re:Moron

[Alsee]

Just apply this simple formula:
My IP - GOOD
Your IP - BAD
Above all, remain blind to to conflicts created by your positions.

Bull.

Go ahead, fond someone with a conflicting position. There's probably someone somewhere, but you'll have to work to find them.

I can't point to some mytical "average slashdotter", but lets use myself as an example, hopefully not to far off form some "average" position.

IP - Bad.

Because it suggests the rediculous position that we are talkign about property. Copyrights and patents and trademarks and trade secrets can be good and usefull, but that are entirely different from property law. They are supposed to be entirely different from property law because information is extremely different from actualy property.

Trademarks - good and useful and exists for the benefit of the public, so people are not deceived about what they are buying or who they are buing it from. However trademark lawsuits have in some cases been used inappropriately beyond their intended purpose, with lawsuits at times being upheld against people where there was absolutely NO reasonable chance the public would be confused or deceived. Someone with a website FordSucks, especially when that website owner is not selling cars, should have no reason to fear a trademark suit. Infact that website owner should easily be able to win a harrassment suit if Ford attempts a trademark suit.

Patents - unpleasant, but again it exists for the benefit of the public. A potentialy valuable incentive to invent and to disclose inventions. However math and logic are not inventions. There is no such thing as a computer implemented invention. The only thing a computer can implement is calculations. You get a patent for novel and non-obvious physical hardware, or for a novel and non-obvious physical process. As the US Supreme Court has rules, all math and algorithms (and thus all possible software) are to be treated as familiar prior art for patent purposes. And there is absoultely nothing novel and non-obvious about the bloody obvious step of using a computer simply to speed up a calculation.

Copyright - there are lots of sparks over this issue, but in general there is little objection to copyright itself. Copyright, like all so called "IP", exists for the benefit of the public, to encourage authors and to ensure and maximize the distribution of those works. The objection is to the cancerous growth of copyright in recent years. There is no simple answer here, but I'd say a damn good start would be to throw out every bloody copyright-related law passed after 1975. The publishing industry would bitch and moan and say that's anti-copyright and that it equals no copyright, but that's a load of bull. We used to have some very reasonable copyright laws, and stiking some laws and returning to traditional copyright does not equal no copyright. Copyright exists for the benefit of the public, and that must be the first consideration in any copyright law.

Oh, and then there's trade secrets. There's not much fight over trade secrets, so long as we absultely uphold the fact that reverse engineering is absolutely legal and legitimate.

-

Re:Moron

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a good point. When I was considering the idea, my thought was that patent ownership be personal and non-transferrable (not even to your children). Also, patents would not expire on the persons death, and although the children could not own the patent directly, the estate of the person could still file on his behalf for violations (for which the procedes could go to the children), to ensure that companies wouldn't just start knocking people off. Or maybe the state would be able to sue on his behalf and keep 1/2 the results or something.

Anyway, to protect jobs, the solution is to allow employee contracts to have a clause saying that the employer automatically gets a license to use any patents held by the employee for the duration of his employment. This would mean companies could use anything their researchers developed, but they'd damn well better keep their researchers happy. Of course, companies might prefer to negotiate licenses directly for significant patents, so that they could continue using them in case the employee went elsewhere. The only other significant rule might be to require that patents can't be given exclusive license: the patent holder can always choose to license the patent elsewhere if he chooses.