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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.'"
send him a penny for each CD you have.
its more than the RIAA would give him.
comment directly in my journal
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?
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.
and sold the rights, /. would curse him
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...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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?
RTFA: He protected his rights, but he was owned by Battelle, and they sold the rights for next to nothing.
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.
I like muppets.
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.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Just look at this poor fellow. He lives at Bellevue! (Mental hospital)
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.
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...
So are we pro-IP or anti-IP this week on Slashdot?
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.
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.
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Let me put on my "surprised" face.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
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
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
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?
Setup a Pay Pal account then.t torrent.com/ ;-)
http://creativecommons.org/
http://www.bi
You need to ask for the adult links.
Peace.
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.
what, now the govt's in the business of fund raising for poor saps?
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....
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.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
That said, I didn't rtfa. But I highly doubt there's any legislative way we could have made this guy get real paid.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
There is another side to this story.
m l
.. they didnt use this guys ideas for any of the main concepts. They had others working on it.
http://www.cdman.com/technical/howdocdswork2.ht
According to Philips and Sony
Looks like they had problems proving they intended it for audio use though.
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).
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.
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.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
He should have made a deal with Philips Electronics to work in the Philips Research Laboratories which are all around the world.
bash$
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ever heard of contingent fee?
I dunno about across the street. Maybe you meant a few minutes on the freeway? But yes its only a couple of miles.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
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.
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.
/. 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.
If the
Retired from a company =! not working at all.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
No, why should we? There's no reason to assume that his pension precludes supplementation.
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
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
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.
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.
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.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
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.
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.
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.
"But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong" - Dennis Miller
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.
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.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
...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".
Didn't the article say that only Japan and Germany had special cases for inventors who work for corps.?
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.
Bad coder! No computer for you!
Le français vous intéresse?
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.
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
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.
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 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.
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
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.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
Tim Berners-Lee recieved a Finnish Technology Award Foundation award to recognize his development of HTML. (1 million dollars)3 341741
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/
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?
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
As it is, I have to work a full time job and four contract jobs just to get by. God bless the modern age.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
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.
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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 Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
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...
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.
No, why?
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.
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.
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.
In Soviet Russia your car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and you likes it....or else.
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.
""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.
I think the patent on writing expired a long time ago.
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...
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
My grandfather invented copy machine duplexing (copying a double sided sheet of paper) and only got a dollar from xerox for getting the patent.
Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares?
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.
No man's an island, unless he's had too much to drink and wets the bed.
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
...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.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
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.
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.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
What does one have to do with the other?
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
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.
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.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
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!!!
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The laserdisc was the precursor to the compact disc and was invented in 1958. Philips and MCA demonstrated a laserdisc in 1972.
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.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
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.
www.sjbaker.org
If you want to work in research and invent things for a living, you have a choice.
...OR...
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.
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.
www.sjbaker.org
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
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
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?
Santa's suicide mission go!
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
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.
This is my World Wide Web of Whatever
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.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.