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Portable Stereo Creator Gets His Due
eadint wrote to mention an International Tribune article covering Sony's settlement with the inventor of the portable stereo. From the article: "Pavel invented the device known today as the Walkman. But it took more than 25 years of battling the Sony Corporation and others in courts and patent offices around the world before he finally won the right to say it: Andreas Pavel invented the portable personal stereo player."
In fact it's a sad story, it shows how it could be difficult to actually earn money from our inventions. It's not really motivating for me and many of us since we all are kind of inventors... Personally I don't think I'd have threw away millions of dollars in court like he did. Kudos to him !
I hate all sigs, mine included.
So the guy gets a cash settlement in the 10s of millions. How much has Sony made from the portable music market?
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"I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous." - David Bradley, inventor of Ctrl-Alt-Del
Seriously, a patent for a "portable" stereo ?
I sure am hell glad there was no patent on portable game consoles. Maybe there is, waiting to sue Sony and Nintendo.
Its too bad this guy one the fight. This patent just as much shows whats wrong with the patent system as the controversies of today.
What an odd thing to say. The Walkman is a personal portable stereo player. Sony invented nothing there, they merely created a personal stereo, and branded it as a "Walkman".
The playstation wasn't invented under the same argument, as it was a subset of a 'game console'.. Not sure who came up with that idea (atari was the first I remember).
Just because this was novel in Hicktown Italy in 1977 doesn't mean it was novel in some of the slightly more go ahead parts of the world. He has basically beaten Sony into submission by harrassment despite losing all of his court cases. Ok maybe we shouldn't shed a tear for Sony who would do much the same themselves.
Did the Walkman actually use any of his technical solutions? Or did he just "invent" the idea of portable music? The difficult part of protable music is not to think it would be nice, but to overcome the difficulties like making it small, light and robust enough.
The fate of engineers in a world where buzzwords earn the money and working people have to go to court for 25 years to get their share.
I'll say it again: Ideas are almost entirely worthless.
Seriously. It's the implementation that counts. This is the problem most people have with the patent system, without even realizing that that's what their problem with it is.
Hey, here's any idea: personal transporters. You'd never have to waste time going anywhere!
Want something more realistic? Pretend it's 1990. How about a really, really good Internet search?
Patents should only be granted if the inventor has an implementation or, at the very least, a plan for an implementation with a time limit on when the implementation must happen.
cygnuhchur
And in general the medical world. Why the hell you think the third world is calling bloody murder on AIDS or drug patent ? Because most of those drug, *not EVEN found or developped by private laboratory* are sold at prohibitive price despite that the production of chemical itself isn't as expensive. This is why soime country (India /Brazil) many time over blatantly broke and violated patents. As for Breast cancer i can remmember sometimes ago a scientist whining because some labor patented a diagnostic process and made it too expensive or illegal to make some research on rbeast cancer (if I recall corrrectly). So granted those example are NOT consumer electronic, but they concern a far more bigger part of the world and a far more important thing : Health.
And do not get me started on US/EU company patenting a remedy used locally (india, Africa) since a long time, and then forbid local people to continue using it because of the patent. 10 years some of those patent held on fought by the country of the originating stuff (I think that was the case of Neme...Somebody call me wrong here). I won't even start speaking of mosento patenting grain and forbidding farmer reusing seed.
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I will have to qualify your statement, and say that strong should refer only to the strictness of enforcement, not the lengthening of period. This is a mistake that the US legislature has made time and again.
When a company can get licensing fees from a patent or copyright past the end of my lifetime, or when the creator's grandchildren can collect royalties throughout their lifetimes, we have done the opposite of what IP law should do. We have *exempted* the entity in question from ever needing to contribute to society again, when the point should be to *tempt* them with the benefits of further innovation after their temporary monopoly has expired.
Jasin NataelTrue science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
Regardless of what Sony may have agreed to in their latest settlement, I agree that it's highly erroneous to claim that Pavel invented the "Walkman" and that at best he might have a claim as "a" father of personal music devices, and not "the father" as is claimed in several sources. Although Sony has grown into a huge faceless multi-national (and was already big at the time), it certainly wasn't faceless at the time and any additional due given to Pavel should not be at the expense of some of the most ingenious innovators of our time.
From the article and other sources, Pavel apparently invented what he called the "Stereobelt" in 1972, which may have been the first personal portable stereo player concept to anticipate a number of the features that latter helped to make the Walkman so successful. Other "portable" players may have been commercially available around the same time, but were usually mono, and not strictly "personal" as they were heavier due to elements such as microphones and external speakers (although I haven't found anything to indicate the actual design of the Stereobelt or whether it was even more than a prototype).
He spent years shopping it around his idea to no avail, before finally patenting it in 1977. I'm not sure about the patent laws of the time, so I don't know how he was able to get away with inventing and offering to sell something for 5 years before receiving his first patent (and then proceeding to file other international patents). My guess: from the brief abstract listed elsewhere in the comments, and from the subsequent actions of Sony (modest settlements), I wouldn't be surprised if his actual patent was quite narrow (looks like there is something about retractable cords) and may have been on shakey ground due to his own (and possibly other) prior art and delay in filing.
At the time, Sony was already selling "portable cassette players" but these were heavy and monoaural. One of the co-founders of Sony, Masaru Ibuka, was a frequent user of one of these products (the "Pressman") and asked Kozo Ohsone to come up with a more portable stereo version. Co-founder and then Sony Chairman Akio Morita correctly saw the potential of the new product to create a new category of "personal" music devices and coined the name "Walkman". Because of his vision and success with the Walkman line, Akio Morita has been (in my opinion) quite rightly credited as the father of the personal stereo, even though the actual Walkman concept was invented by Ibuka and Ohsone.
As the article points out, Sony did in fact settle with Pavel over a German patent in the early eighties, but Pavel was frustrated over his claim of inventorship and continued to sue Sony through the 90's dispite continually losing in court. Only after Ibuka and Akio's deaths did Sony Corporation provide a second settlement that apparently provides him with some additional credit tied to the "Walkman" and what is a relatively token amount (probably didn't help much beyond his court costs) to stop him from his public criticism and litigation.
I think it's sad that the significant contributions of Ibuka and especially Morita might be so easily discounted since their death. And while I'm supportive of inventors such as Pavel getting their due, from the face of it I don't think he was particularly hard done by all these millions of dollars later for an idea he had thirty years ago -- this story is a far cry from an entrepreneur that worked hard to implement their idea, start and grow a business, and then had it stolen out from under them. He probably had a valid, if narrow, infringement case when he first settled twenty years ago. But that he could even *consider* suing today's MP3 manufacturers (long after any loosely connected patents have expired) just show how clearly ridiculous his notions are of his intellectual property rights.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
And that was when patents didn't have stupid lifetimes...
I'm pretty sure that patents in the United States are still only good for twenty years from the date of filing. The stupid lifetimes you're thinking of are related to copyrights, which last for the age of Mickey Mouse plus twenty years.
The question of whether or not twenty years is a 'stupid lifetime' is of course open for discussion, as are twists like compulsory licenses.
~Idarubicin