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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...
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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?
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.