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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.
I, Todd Aspeotis invented the iPod! iShall send forth my iLawyers to iSue you for my iPatent. iWish iHad some iFriends so they could see my name iN the iMedia, but iDon't.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
In a way, Nintendo helped. Sony and Nintendo were working a joint effort to make a CD-based version of the Super NES. Nintendo screwed them over, and Sony went off and made the Playstation.
Considering that the Walkman is a name brand personal stereo player and considered by the general public to be the first personal stereo player, I'd say that it is an apt summary of the situation.
And considering that Sony was manufacturing and doing R&D for Nintendo's consoles prior to the N64 and that the play station development was initiated by Nintendo, I wouldn't say that Nintendo invented the Play Station but Nintendo definetly had a hand in it's conception.
wiki
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.
So why is this not an obvious invention? Because it is a single guy against a big company, suddenly it's ok to patent something pretty obvious and try to start cashing in on it? This of course means that the manufacturers will increase the prices in order to cover the extra licensing costs. If someone working for Microsoft had patented this 25 years ago and now won the patent, most people on Slashdot would be huffing and puffing with their faces red. But when it's a single guy against the "new evil empire" Sony, let's all cheer for him. Never mind that it's the consumer that gets screwed in the end.
But as for that before winning the right he finally to say
My lexical analyser dumped core trying to get through that.
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
He filed a patent in 1977 for fucks sake. Tape recorders already came in stereo, they already had headphones, they already were getting smaller, my dad had a phillips one with a battery pack and a carrying strap.
t ory/superscopehistory.shtml
So what was his invention? What??
Similar in style to the tape recorder on this page:
http://www.superscopetechnologies.com/company/his
"In 1975, Superscope's product line included: eight portable tape recorders, six portable-cassette radio products, seven Hi Fi receivers, two tuners, three amplifiers, five stereo tape decks, six speaker models, five compact music systems, eight microphones "
http://www.grundig.com/index.php?id=250
1965 The Cassette Recorder C 100 is the first cassette tape recorder made by Grundig. Recording takes place with the DC International System, on cassettes with the dimensions 120 x 77 x 12 mm.
1967 The CC Compact Cassette is introduced and can be listened to with the Cassette Tape Recorder C 200.
1974: The portable Radio Recorder C 6000 Automatic is a best-seller. Over 710,000 units are sold.
He filed for his patent in 1977.
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.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
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