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."

Comments

Sad story

[c_fel]

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 !

Re:Sad story

[Mattygfunk1]

Imagine the number of every day products which have "true" inventors without a cent to their name.

The warm and fuzzy feeling of having created an idea that benefited millions probably doesn't have the same effect knowing that you were robbed of personal finacial benefits.

__
I watch funny adult videos.

Re:Sad story

[Grym]

Exactly, this story completely undermines the entire argument that the patent system somehow benefits small inventors--it doesn't.

SURE, this guy won in the end... AFTER 25 YEARS. How many countless other inventors have simply given up? Would this guy have been able to also patent new ideas or defend other contested patents during this time period?

What's the point in intellectual property if you're realistically only allowed to keep what companies don't want?

-Grym

Re:Slight correction

[malkavian]

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).

Not sure I understand

[David Off]

I'm not sure I understand the invention here (unless we are defining "invention" in the terms used by the USPO). When I was at school back in the early 1970s there were girls who would walk around with headphones and casette recorders to listen to music using the Philips Compact Audio casette system. which was introduced in 1963. I don't know if you remember these casette players, they would work on batteries and had a strap so they could be carries over the shoulder like a handbag. The walkman just seems like the usual Japanese refinement and minituarization of the system... I don't see an inventive process here except for certain component technologies such as the compact audio cassette. There were also portable music systems based on the 45RPM record available from the early 1970s.

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.

What did he invent?

[TorKlingberg]

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.

That's how it is..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Ideas are almost entirely worthless...

[SpotBug]

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.

Breast cancer diagnosis. AIDS drugs.

[aepervius]

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.

Re:The hypocrisy of Slashdot

[Jasin Natael]

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 Natael