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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?
and sold the rights, /. would curse him
How much "royalties" does the coder who implemented 1-click get, do you think?
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Probably none. Most employment agreements give the employer IP rights to things employees are paid to develop.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
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.
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.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
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!
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.
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"
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.
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
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.