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

Re:Moron

[abramsh]

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

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...

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.

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

[natet]

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

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: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.

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.

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:Ripped off

[lottameez]

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

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?

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: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:Slashdot swings both ways

[Moofie]

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

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.