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Inventing the Telephone, Independently
An anonymous reader writes "There is a nice article about the history of the telephone at AmericanHeritage.com. Most of us know that Alexander Bell beat Elisha Gray to the patent office by mere hours to claim credit for the invention of the telephone, but did you know that two other inventors can also claim the invention, including Thomas Edison? Similar disputes about independent invention and patent ownership can be found regarding the television, the airplane, and the automobile. Maybe it really is true: the economic benefit of encouraging patents is like that of encouraging window breaking."
it was a war on the rights to the First Patent Post.
You can't handle the truth.
little known fact: Al Gore also invented the telephone.
*I* invented the telephone you insensitive clods!
We will patent no invention before its time.
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they rarely are.
Duplicating good ideas should be expected. Something like calculus shouldn't be trademarked, etc.
But if you place the threshhold high enough, patents (esp. for a limited duration and done right) can be very much warranted and beneficial.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Fancy that...issues with copyrighting. I never would have imagined such a thing!
I seem to remember that Thomas Jefferson was against patents because he thought that invention was a natural course of evolution and that invention was inevitable product of the society and not the product of the individual. At least that's how I remember it.
Maybe it really is true: the economic benefit of encouraging patents is like that of encouraging window breaking.
That doesn't follow from the fact that inventions are often independently reinvented. Inventions are so often independently reinvented because new inventions depend at least as much on having all of the supporting technologies and ideas in place as they do on the cleverness of the inventor. Once the prerequisites are in place, it's not surprising that several bright people will simultaneously hit on the way to put them together. However, it's still possible that without the knowledge that patents will allow them to protect the results of their success, inventors might not be *motivated* to create their inventions.
It's equally possible that the existence of patents doesn't provide any incentive to potential inventors. I think the truth is somewhere in between, but the main point is that the frequency of multiple independent invention doesn't really say anything one way or the other about the efficacy of patents as motivators for creating and publishing new ideas.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
In other words, independent creation of invention occurs in part because the economic incentive of patents encourages many people to work on the problem simultaneously. Without that encouragement, perhaps none of them would have worked on the telephone and it might not have happened until much later.
Ah! here's the link to Thomas Jefferson's take on patents. http://www.usewisdom.com/sayings/patentsj.html
I don't normally post to Slashdot anymore, but I just want to point out that Elisha Gray is my great, great, great grandfather. Not that I saw any of the money. Ah well. It's something to tell the kids.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
Yes, patents can be abused, as with submarine patents. And patents can slow technological progress, as with the wing warping patent battles. But I don't think it logically follows that patents are always bad, and that technological progress would be faster without them. After all, the patent system was created to reduce trade secrecy and and encourage invention, and it certainly does that, however imperfectly.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
In 100 years time, Bill Gates will be credited with inventing the computer, and Al Gore the first public computer network. Sad, but you know it's true. Who invented the light bulb?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The one thing you will never see in this lifetime is Bill Gates standing in line at the Patent Office while Steve Ballmer barricades the front door.
Even back in 1876, the USPTO ignored prior art.
Philipp Reis' version of the telephone is from 1860.
Antonio Meucci's version of the telephone is from 1854.
Meucci's version is not really the invention of
the phone either, the principle probably was discovered
by Page in 1837, but Meucci *did* file for a US
patent, which he did not get simply because he
ran out of funds.
So in 1876 there was a rush to get a patent
on the phone, where four guys competed, none
of whom was anywhere close to being the
original inventor of the phone.
Thomas
"Did you know the Indians invented the wire recorder?"
--
BMO
P.S. - it's disturbing how "Everything You Know Is Wrong" is so similar to late-night talk radio these days.
Bridges come in all shapes and sizes, from the 4,200 ft span of the Golden Gate to the pipes under the road at the top end of Sandy Creek. If anything software is even more diverse, from programs with tens of millions of lines of code down to simple routines of a line or two to automate some mundane task.
Constructing a bridge costs, as does developing software. The vast majority of bridges are public property. They have been funded and built by such a large pool of people - government's of one form or another - for the common good, for use by anyone at anytime. However there is a substantial pool of private bridges. Most of these are bridges built for specific non standard vehicles such as trains. Others are built for the conveyance of standard vehicles but tolls are charged for a variety of reasons.
Starting from the precept "We are human, we can do anything and get to anywhere we want", a toll bridge must provide a cheaper and/or quicker alternative to other ways of getting from A to B. To invest in the toll bridge its constructor determines that he can charge a particular toll, at that toll he will get a particular amount of traffic and that this income will repay the cost of building the bridge. The constructor needs to satisfy themselves about the surety of the factors that affect the bridge usage. They minimize their risk by identifying as many factors that will adversely affect bridge traffic as possible and blocking these adverse factors where possible.
Where huge bridges are required, the Golden Gate, Sydney Harbour and the like, tolls can be seen to be fair without imposing monopoly conditions on the general populace. No conditions need imposing on ferry services, no conditions need imposing blocking alternate routes, the bridge operates in a standard competitive environment because it is so obviously a beneficial object.
On less obviously beneficial bridges the actions of people are substantial factors that affect the financial viability of the bridge. Controlling these actions is a form of monopoly rights granted by the relevant government(s). These rights include: restricting other river crossings; guarantees of road construction to ensure their bridge is the prime route over the river; concessions that the investors have the sole rights to offer peripheral services, service centres offering fuel and food etc. These rights are generally granted for a limited time and the bridge often reverts to public ownership at the expiration of this time.
This model is open to abuse. The rights granted may be disproportionate to the benefits. A bridge may be built over a small creek for little cost and the constructor granted a perpetual ban on any other bridges being built 20 miles in either direction. Or the government may agree that other routes will be closed or allowed to degrade, or they may put restrictions on other services, or they may allow the operator to insist that users of the bridge utilize other services before they can use the bridge etc. etc.
Transferring this view of bridges to intellectual property one would have to conclude that there are no Golden Gates or Sydney Harbour's. Every method developed has alternatives that can be simply developed and deployed. Intellectual property monopoly rights can only be related to the pipes under the headwaters of Sandy Creek with a guaranteed monopolies 20 miles in either direction. They are completely out of proportion with the benefits these pipes offer.
In fact the situation is worse than this. A better metaphor is monopoly rights to a pipe under a train line. The pipe owners charge not only a toll for using the bridge but force you to load your car onto their railway carriage and force you to utilize their passenger service for the 200 yard journey over the Sandy Creek floodplain. The alternative is to drive an extra 50 miles through the mountains because they have monopoly veto rights over any road bridges over Sandy Creek.
Another alternative, that can be likened to op
The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime - Floyd, Pink
Patents are the exact opposite of a true free-market capitalistic system. In this case, the "goods" are ideas, and there is only one seller that controls the market for it. That seller determines the price and who can/cannot buy this idea. This is clearly a monopoly. Capitalism can only work when there's millions of sellers and millions of buyers. When such conditions do not exist, socialism needs to be instituted.
Patents prevent a true free market for ideas, and yet, in our current system, the value of the ideas are controlled by the patent holder. The system of patents need to change, to include things like price controls of the ideas, or to allow multiple patent holders if developed independently.
Do economists agree with this in all cases?
The idea that the shopkeeper may have spent the money on something else may not be true. He might have done. Or he might have been hoarding the money. The glazier on the other hand, is more likely to see that money as a perk, and spend it immediately.
Did Hoover Dam mean that the US was out by the cost of one dam? Did Nazi Germany's economy suffer because they were spending a lot of money on weapons? Why does the modern capitalist society encourage us to spend more and more on luxuries we really don't need?
Surely if the broken window fallacy was totally a fallacy, we could all work less. We don't all need new cars. My 10 year old TV still works as well as it did the day I bought it. Modern technology means we could all easily have a very comfortable lifestyle, with the essentials of life - with shelter, and all the food and clothing we need - if we all worked a 20 hour week. Most of society spends its time producing non-essential luxuries that people certainly don't need and wouldn't want if we weren't constantly told how good they are. According to the broken window fallacy, society is out of pocket be a very large number of luxury goods.
The problem with patents is that most people think that patent owners are heroes and if your country awards more patents it is an indicator on how inventive your country is. People also believe that patents encourage a competitive industry.
Newsflash: Patents = monopolies
A patent is a monopoly on a technology. The patent office is a government institution that hands out several thousand monopolies each year. Most of these monopolies are awarded to foreign corporations.
Why would someone who believes in market economy and free competition support the government handing out monopolies?
How can handing out monopolies to corporations increase competition in the market place?
Why is Microsoft, a convicted monopolist, applying for, and getting a large number of legal monopolies? Why does the government sue MS for abusing their monopoly, and then give them thousands of legally enforcable monopolies?
)9TSS
The real inventor of telephone is Antonio Meucci, Bell stole the idea from him.
What is amazing is the fact the two names quoted in the original post are Bell and Gray : The person who tried to patent the idea.
Recognition of Meuci by the Congress
Other lesser know inventions by Thomas Edison:
- The Tuxedo T-Shirt
- The Tampon
- and an early version of the inflatable love doll.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
But I don't think it logically follows that patents are always bad
But it need not, for patents to be a net disadvantage.
After all, the patent system was created to reduce trade secrecy and and encourage invention, and it certainly does that, however imperfectly.
I'm not sure about that.
At the research facility where I worked before the current one that I'm working at, important inventions that really provided an edge over the competition was always kept a trade secret? Why? Because everyone in the industry cross-licensed with each other, because otherwise nobody could actually build anything. Patenting something was just giving it to the competition. Patents were reserved for less useful things.
The net effect was to keep anyone new from entering the market. Patents don't have to all be perfect -- if there are two hundred patents held by incumbents waiting to attack anyone wanting to enter the market, most of the patents can be thrown out and the newcomer is still going to have a hard time entering the market.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
IMHO, copyrights can't survive the information age, but patents are far more evil. The imposition of patents in most cases is nothing short of plain physical coercion. The fact is that 99% of invention is progressive, just another stage built upon the countless other layers of understanding and invention already out there. The only competition that patents promote is trying to lock out new inventions that might allow new technology to bypass your patent portfolio.
That simply isn't true. There are issues with the patent system, but if you feel that 99% of the time they cause harm, you really just don't understand the entire issue. I can think of at least one industry that would literally die over night if patents were suddenly done away with.
Pharmaceutical research would pretty much grind to a halt without IP laws. It can take up to a billion dollars to push a single drug from discovery, to lab testing, past regulation, and into production. No one is going to drop a billion dollars just to have their closest competitor copy what they just achieved at not cost to themselves. It simply would not happen.
This is the case in a lot of leading edge fields. In a lot of fields you need to create something that is amazing complex and capital intensive. You need to drop millions or billions of dollars on developing a product before it becomes viable. IP protection is the only thing that gives you any sort of assurance that if you find something, someone just can't steal it.
I am not saying that the current IP system is all roses. In fact, it down right sucks in many ways. That said, claiming that IP in general is a great evil that needs to be done away with is utterly ignoring the role it serves in helping to spur R&D work.
Several people invented the telephone, independently, partly because they all wanted patent-enforced monopolies that could make them rich.
Maybe I'm chasing an impossible dream, but I have to wonder if there's a better way to provide a strong incentive to create ideas and other information other than by placing artificial restrictions on the availability and use of that information. I've got no ideas here.
Excellent. Now go and do some research on who actually had a working device and get back to me.
I cannot believe that no one has mentioned Chuck Norris yet.
Using "violence" to describe a bunch of whining oily pencils calling their lawyers to write a letter is just as dumb as using "property" to describe something without any tangible manifestation or value. (or "terrorism" to denote looking at a cop cockeyed or being brown skinned for that matter)
What is it with peoples misuse of basic language these days?
Everything else you say is pretty much on the money. A better term is possibly "abuse". The system is abused because it's hopelessly quaint and irrelevant in the 21st century, but it isn't _violence_.
hahahahaha i love your sig
I know there are many claims to who is the inventor of the Telephone. There are similar claims about the TV.
The link to the "inventor" of the tv fails to completely mention John Logie Baird.
This very eccentric scotsman was a pioneer in TV development. There is still to this day a great debate amongst historians about who was first.
http://www.infed.org/walking/wa-baird.htm
The first TV pictures he sent were down a phone line!
At least the place where the worlds first TV station broadcast from is still standing and is a great monument to those involved.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
The parts that are done secretly, while reinventing processes others in turn also have been inventing, fighting with tooth and nail to be a few months ahead, yes.
Maybe I'm biased, working in software engineering. I regulary see patents being applied (and granted) for extremely trivial things. There might have been a time where patents lead to a net benefit, but I have had my doubts for several years that it's the case now (and yes - that's including the pharmaceutical industry, even if it means a slight change in how they work)
it's in my head
Would we have a better system if we let all 4 inventors share ideas and work on a mutually compatible telephone system? I doubt they would have agreed to it to be honest. Inventors are stubborn, "I'm right you're not" kind of people :)
We all complain about the battle for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, all those memory card standards, all number of things. Patents ARE like breaking windows; in such a free market it encourages thousands of "patent-avoiding" inventions. Companies (and inventors) would rather have their own patent portfolio than license someone else's.
But therein lies the rub: patents are useful. The window-breaking is what companies do when they refuse to license a patent from someone, and putting windows within a stone's throw and daring people to break it is what companies do when they refuse to put a patent out as licensable.
The free market should be free, and patents a revenue source, not a contrived lock-in for greedy corporations. And let's be clear again: it's the greedy corporations at fault here, and not the patent system.
Philipp Reis had. He showed it to the Frankfurter Physikalischer Verein in 1860. The first sentence ever spoken via wire was "Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat." (The horse doesn't feed on cucumber salad.) One of the members of the Physikalischer Verein invented the nonsense sentence to make sure the demonstration wasn't rigged.
Philipp Reis invented the name 'telephon' (1863). He died in 1874, so he had no chance to battle A.G.Bell in court.
(1) SOME patents are bad patents (they patent obvious and/or previously innovated ideas)
(2) Therefore ALL patents are bad and our society shouldn't have patents
(1) is true. (2) is false. (2) does not follow from (1). The hostility to IP on slashdot really amazes me, especially considering all the stuff we would not have if it were not for patents:
AIDs drugs would never have been developed if after billions of dollars spent on research, the drug would instantly be copied by generics and sold for zilch. For example Gilead Sciences was founded in 1987 and burned investor money for a decade before getting its AIDS drug approved. If they couldn't sell it for a high price, investors would stop making expensive long term investments in biotech.
If some invention costs $X to develop, it is ILLOGICAL to invent it if the inventing person/company cannot earn more than $X from the invention. If some knockoff company can come in and steal the idea, then the inventing company will NOT earn $X. This is especially true if the development cost is high and the distribution cost is low. Knockoff companies will compete and drive the product's price close to the cost of manufacturing the product, and there will be no way to recoup development costs.
I agree there needs to be more separating the wheat from the chaffe in patents, but the blanket hostility to patents I so often see here is logically unsound and in the real world, will literally lead to disease, death, and worse lives for everyone.
...The article says: Bell was not the first to invent the telephone (that's why in Italy we honor Meucci for that, even though the idea was probably even earlier) but he was the first to patent it, because he was richer and had better lawyer. It seems that nothing has changed in the past 150 years after all.
Ander
@=
source
I wonder what it would be like if everyone who invented the same device could receive their own patents as long as their applications were filed before any were published.
But this still cuts out all those who legitimately develop something obvious after it has been patented. What is obvious to one person may not be obvious to a patent examiner. Just because it was not obvious to a patent examiner does not mean it would not have been obvious to any number of others who are at the top of their fields and should have the right to do research without the landmines laid everywhere for them by the government-granted monopolies or even oligopolies you propose. It would still be badly broken. It denies others the right to independently develop without paying taxes to the one who hired the lawyers first.
Information, especially in today's Internet age, has a distribution cost of close to 0. The cost of giving information to 1 additional person (marginal cost) is close to 0 and therefore the economically efficient price is close to 0. To efficiently distribute CURRENTLY KNOWN information, the price should be close to 0.
BUT, if the price for all information were 0, then there would be no incentives to create new ideas. There would be no incentive to develop AIDS drugs etc... To create incentives to create new ideas, the price of information has to go above 0, but any price above 0 leads to less dissemination of information that we would like.
As I understand it, this is a fundamental problem with no solution. I think the goal of a patent/copyright system isn't to create a perfect system (which is impossible) but to create a workable system that strikes a reasonable balance between disseminating information and creating new information.
**Warning: the following is an impossible solution** This is totally theoretical, but if you were some kind of all seeing god of pricing, you could charge different people different prices for the same information. If Alex valued a new mp3 from SuperAwesomeBand at $0.50 I would charge him $0.45 or something like that. If Bob valued the same mp3 at $0.02, I would charge him $0.01 If it were possible to know how much each person valued a piece of information, then you could practice price discrimination and you would have efficient creation of new information and efficient dissemination of information. But practicing price discrimination like that is impossible.
But the very requirement that it be high-priced and obscenely profitable warps the development to an extreme degree at various levels, both in the value of the drug to the masses who cannot afford it, after such huge moneys were spent on it that might have been spent on a more-rational approach if one of the requirements had not been developing something so different from traditional approaches that no one else would be allowed to copy it when it was completed.
People might make the same argument about an operating system, that no one would produce one given the high costs if it were not possible to earn high profits from every copy sold. If (and this is a big if) it were impossible to do the research in any other way, charitable organizations could easily help, if it weren't for all the patent minefields and money of the drug cartel that obstructs them today. Research would not be done in the same way as today, and that would be a good thing. If drug research is the best argument you have, your argument is lost.
Like their illegal drug counterparts, if it were not for the laws restricting their development and production, the free market would reduce the prices and they would be developed anyway. I'd like to see how much of the actual money for all the supporting research aids drugs came from public coffers anyway, only to have the resulting drugs patented and exploited by the few.
Directly comments on the theme of the article
Is 100% factualy accurate
Is logically sound
I guess anyone who doesn't buy the anti-IP hype gets modded as a troll. I think that's a shame.
Funny. Your claims about the pharmaceutical industry sound exactly like the TV commericials I see from them. You have been brainwashed.
The fact is that overwhelmimg majority of basic research discoveries done in medicine are done by university affiliated researchers who may benefit a little from big dicoveries, but usually not as much as you think. They don't have the leverage and so get bought by big pharma at a low price.
Most of the money that pharmaceutical companies spend is on clinical trials and marketing. Actually, of the several hundred million dollars per drug that is spent on "developing" a new drug, the majority is actually marketing.
Jefferson's slaves, who had to translate his ideas into reality, might have appreciated some more immeadiate return for their labor.
Jefferson was blind to the Industrial Revolution but he surely understood only too well that the slave states were not going to be a hotbed of innovation.
that for some people, the Al Gore/Internet inspired jokes are like sex.
Sure, it's pretty much the same thing every time, but somehow it never becomes boring.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Look at freedom instead of patents.
A free people will use their imagination to improve their lives. Therefore, they will invent.
And, concerning strong patents, no, the US has not had particularly strong patents until fairly recently. Maybe it's a coincidence, but the telephone monopoly was broken up about the same time patents started being made too strong (by allowing algorithms, business methods, and other ideas to be made subject to patent, and the the swamp of re-tread patents that resulted, and the failure to check patents properly in the crush). Anyway, the telephone monopoly breakup is what has been fueling the innovation so that it could continue in spite of stronger patents.
And that is what SCO is on about. Darl should be excommunicated.
There was no TV patent dispute: Farnsworth invented it, RCA attempted to steal it and failed. The history of RCA under Sarnof is truly disgusting. The company fortune was built on patents stolen from Major Armstrong who invented the super regenerative, super heterodyne, and FM radios as well as the phase lock loop. Armstrong committed suicide after he lost - in one of the worst court decisions in recorded history.- the FM case to RCA
Most of the abuses of the patent system would simply disappear if only individuals could own patents - instead of companies.
This may of course suggest that many "inventions" are nowhere near as unrelated as their "inventors" might (quite honestly) wish to believe - which calls for restraint in strengthening the patent system without clear evidence of its benefits.
Sir William G. Armstrong, president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, put it this way - in 1863(!):
Albeit first made in a different context, it is also worth recalling Victor Hugo's observation from the same era that:for example, where great mathematical proofs come from.
However, where most inventions come from doesn't seem at all mysterious to me. The only really surprising thing in the whole lineage of the telephone is the inventions of the idea of an electrical circuit. That was a stroke of genius.
After the ciruit was invented, it seems to me it was only a matter of time before somebody invented the doorbell, which in turn begat the telegraph which in turn begat the telephone which in turn begat radio.
Along the way, there have of course been contributory strokes of genius. The superheterodyne receiver, for example, is pure genius. But the chain of inventions, to my way of thinking, pretty much follows a logical progression. Once telegraphy becomes a lucrative business, people start working on telegraphy related inventions, using more or less the same materials and stock of knowledge. The Bell story is an example of this.
Bell was trying to create, in effect, what we'd call today a frequency division multiplexing system for digital signals. You can see a kind of parallel evolution here to digital telecomuniations. The same problem (expensive data lines being a limiting factor) leads to the same idea (send multiple signals down the same lines by frequency shifting). The technology to do this, it turns out, is exactly what is needed for a rudimentary telephone, and even though that was not what he set out to do, that was the next logical development.
I'm not a historical determinist by any stretch of the imagination. But I think there evidence is clear that in technology, the frequency of this simultaneous invention has to make me believe that many inventions were "in the air" -- that is to say their time had come -- not in their inventors' heads.
The Bell/Gray story has always struck me as a bit fishy. It could be that the problem was Bell was one of those perfectionists who wait until their hand was forced; however if this is the case why did he move on that particular day? His lawyer must have had some intelligence on what the competitors were doing. But even so, the fact the several people were so close calls into question whether the telephone can be considered "non-obvious" in the way patentable inventions are supposed to be. I wonder how many patents would be issued if having a number of people hot on the trail of the invention were taken as ipso facto proof that the invention was "obvious".
This doesn't necessarily preclude patents functioning to promote the progress of useful arts and sciences. It just means that the idea that a patent system is needed to be fair to inventors is wrong. There are just too many arbitrary factors involved.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So there are a couple of interesting bits to this:
(1) Watt produced few steam engines while he held the patent. He spent his time in court, not in a factory/on-site making steam-engines. Nor did he improve upon it. Others did.
(2) Innovation happened despite his patent, but were simply held back until the patent expired. So, it can easily be argued that patents held back the industrial revolution by (roughly) the duration of the patent.
(3) After the patent expired, and despite newcomers to the field, and despite everyone having twenty years to prepare for this eventuality, Watt was able to make a living selling, installing and servicing steam engines. Despite other advances, and despite competitors also making steam engines, his expertise and his steam engines were still saleable commodities.
From all this it can easily be argued that without patents we would be further (technologically) along than we are today. It can be further argued that patents were unnecessary for Watt to earn an income/return on his investment. Since these are the two basic arguments for patent protection it's easy to see that patent was in fact a negative effect on one of the most important events in the last few hundred years.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
and the world would be better for it.
Every hour of overtime you put in is an hour somebody else could have been paid to work.
And if everyone were working 20, maybe 30 hours a week, there would be sufficient product for all. And we'd all have more time for taking care of our health, our relationships with family and friends, and other really important things.
The real reason, as it always is, is money. If I could get a law passed that guaranteed my income (by way of eliminating competition) without further effort I'd sure talk to my buddies in the government about getting such a law passed. I'd probably discuss it with them at a lavish dinner party that poor folks weren't invited to...
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
For example, those countries with the 'weakest' patent systems have often shown more innovation than those with 'strong'. This is particularly true of Switzerland and drug patents, and even of Germany (compared to the US and Britain prior to the 1970s).
"(and yes - that's including the pharmaceutical industry, even if it means a slight change in how they work)"
Easy to say in so trite a manner. Please explain these "slight" changes, why they are needed and how the pharm industry can accomplish the shift and still be productive. Please be succint.
In other words, you're bullshitting.
And you've been brainwashed by the "corporations are eeeeeviiiillll" crowd. Provide some statistics instead of simply regurgitating their selling points, please.
Does not follow. A German in germany is not subject to the USPTO. He wouldn't have been able to battle anyway, international displutes weren't regularly entertained in mid 1800's.
Both Meucci and Reis had working devices which they demonstrated publicly. Compared to Reis' device,
Bell's phone is supposed to have better quality when transmitting speech and poorer quality when transmitting music.
Page did not have a working device, but without
Page's research none of the other guys would
have gotten started.
Thomas
Is it a mere coincidence that Windows is so prone to breaking?
But at least his invention would (as prior art) have prevented A.G.Bell's patent being valid. But the USPTO decided to grant the patent anyway.
Sorry, I thought that was obvious from my previous post. When it's no longer economically feasible to perform all R&D yourself you start cooperating with other companies, sharing the costs.
This has been done already in a number of other high cost sectors (telecom) - why should the pharmaceutical industry need special treatment?
it's in my head
You need to do some reading about patents and their apparent negative consequences on innovation. Even (maybe especially) in the pharmaceutical industry.
n st.htm
Check out this report in particular chapter one and nice. Unfortunately it's in PDF format.
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/agai
re: Bell, Isn't it so typical of a Canadian to steal the thunder for someone else's hard work? Talk about a nation of low-down, snivelling, back-stabbing weasels. Smart folk lock up their daughters when those cheating Canucks are around.
BTW - did I ever mention that I invented the internet mere hourse before Al Gore? (A surprising number of people don't realize the web was born in Moose Jaw) The queen is going to knight me for sure...
Pharmaceutical research would pretty much grind to a halt without IP laws. It can take up to a billion dollars to push a single drug from discovery, to lab testing, past regulation, and into production. No one is going to drop a billion dollars just to have their closest competitor copy what they just achieved at not cost to themselves. It simply would not happen.
Actually the facts show that just the opposite happens. http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/ip.ch.9.m1004 .pdf Both Germany and then later Italy, and now India have/had thriving pharmacutcial R&D industries right up till patent systems got put in place. What you say sounds nice in theory, but in practice it punishes people who collaberate on R&D between companies and researchers, but on the bright side it does benefit lawyers and marketing departments.
This is the case in a lot of leading edge fields. In a lot of fields you need to create something that is amazing complex and capital intensive. You need to drop millions or billions of dollars on developing a product before it becomes viable. IP protection is the only thing that gives you any sort of assurance that if you find something, someone just can't steal it.
Once again, you don't know what you're talking about. There is a reason why the non proprietary x86 architecture took over the market place, and the better designed motorolla one didn't. There is a reason why we use ethernet networks today, and not token-ring, there is a reason why the IP protocool took off and the novell networks protocool didn't, there is a reason why the Mac's didn't seize the market place even though it was a better GUI and came before Microsoft. And today there is a reason why Microsoft is getting their butt kicked in the server space today by Linux. There is a reason why biotech stagnated for 10 years till they started to apply open-source ideas to DNA. How come the innovation in boitech has increased in the last 3 years while the number of patent submissions has gone down? It just amazes me the people who wouldn't recognize a free market - even when it rpis them a new one.
If you follow the money, and you follow the industry: It says the message loud and clear that patents and copyrights are shit, and it greatly rewards any industry and company that figures out new ways to bypass the proprietary crap of someone else.
It remids me of the people who said "well Marxisim is good, it was just implemented bad" - while blowing off the 100 million people who were murdered because of it over the last 50 years. Bullshit. Facts mean something, and when they don't back up theories than it is the theories are shit not the facts.
The fact here is that patents are violent, patents are evil, and there are millions of dead people in Africa to prove it, and hundreds and thousands of dead companies that "had" good implementations to prove it here.
Edison DID improve Bell's telephone with the carbon
... if he added a third element between the filament and the anode wire,
grain transmitter. Perhaps this is the reference to Edison
inventing the telephone. Edision also missed something else,
though it might have been obvious in hindsight, it would have
been hard to see at the time.
The telephone in Edison's time was limited in range. At the
time he improved the telephone transmitter there was still the
problem of long distance phone circuits, too much power
lost in the wires. A way to recover the lost signal was needed.
Induction coils helped to a point, but range was still limited
to a few hundred miles, not enough for a cross country circuit.
At the time he was doing the telephone work, Edison also was
working on the electric lamp. The early carbon filament bulbs
turned black on the inside due to the carbon boiling off the filament
and being deposited on the inside of the bulb. There was a shadow
on the side of the bulb in line with the filament, but on ONLY ONE
side of the bulb. Edison inserted a wire into the bulb between the
legs of the filament. He discovered that a current would flow between
this wire and the positive side of the filament, but not the negative side.
He had discovered thermionic-emission, the Edison Effect. He didn't understand
how current could flow in a vacuum, but there it was.
The atomic theory of matter was in it's infancy at the time, but it was
assumed that electricity was the flow of small negativly charged particles
of matter. They even had a name, electrons. With a bit of a reasoning,
Edison could have figured that the negativly charged electrons were attracted
to the positivly connected wire and were repeled by a negatively connected one.
Then
he could control the flow of the current. In fact he would find that a small
change in voltage of the control element would cause the same change in current
as a large change in voltage on the anode element. This is the same
ratio as the Mu of a triode vacuum tube!
This bit of reasoning would have given Edison an amplifier to enable him to
build long distance phone circuits. It would have to wait until Lee Deforest
and Westen Electric in 1910 to put the Edison Effect to work here.
Edison wasn't Enstein. He couldn't perform the needed thought experiments
to streach the Edison Effect into a triode amplifier, but the required thought
process is very simple and could have been done with what was known about
electricity and matter at the time.
I can think of at least one industry that would literally die over night if patents were suddenly done away with.
Patent law? Oh, those poor starving attorneys. Yeah, that's a beaut all right. Well hell, I can think of a whole bunch of industries that will "literally die over night" if marijuana prohibition was suddenly done away with. So, I guess it's much better to drag all of society down to the depths with draconian, racist, unjust law so that these industries can survive. Especially the expanding private prisons. We're giving people jobs. No matter that it's the devil's work.
Pharmaceutical research would pretty much grind to a halt without IP laws.
Oh please! That just doesn't wash. It's just another tired old smoke screen designed to cover up and distract us from the rampant corruption and featherbedding, and of course "packaging".
Yes IP is a farce designed to restrict the flow of knowledge. It only spurs hoarding and speculation for the benefit of very few people.
What?
Johann Philipp Reis invented the telephone, 10-15 years before Bell .
I think those who desire a privilege have to show they are worthy of the privilege, not the other way around.
You may have failed to notice that Switserland has quite a name in development of drugs and such, and at least till recently had a rather weak patent system.
Sorry, I thought that was obvious from my previous post. When it's no longer economically feasible to perform all R&D yourself you start cooperating with other companies, sharing the costs.
I am sorry, are you suggesting that the massive phara corps join TOGETHER to form one massive cartel has enough money to push through drugs and then not compete with each other to ensure profit?
Yes IP is a farce designed to restrict the flow of knowledge. It only spurs hoarding and speculation for the benefit of very few people.
Copyrights are designed to restrict the flow of knowledge, patents are designed to restrict it's application. That's why patents are soo dangerous - you can't stop information with a tank, but you can stop it's application. Patnets brought to their logical conclusion will result in nothing but violence. For history we can look at the plantation era and the emergence into the industrial revolution which forced the commoditisation of the labor force and the death of the plantation system. Controlling the labor force as a property right required physical violence, and so will patents eventually.
The Civil War was the bloodiest war in history, and cost more American lives than WW1, WW2, Viet Nam, Korea, and Iraq combined. Why was it the most bloody? because we were just learning how to create new technologies to kill people (machine guns, gas, etc ...), but hadn't evolved to learn any defenses yet. If we are smart, we will learn from that and kill patents now before they blow up in our faces. The wealth of the plantaion system didn't matter, the fact that they called slaves property didn't matter, and all those well educated business men who thought they knew what business and property and commerce were about - they were wrong ........ well, the same is true with patnets today.
Do I know for a fact that things will end up that violent? well no. But considering their track record with AIDS in Africa the prospects do not look good.
But I do know that the rate of inventions increased dramatically in the past couple of hundred years.
There's some data!
The problem, of course, is that it proves nothing. For every Industrial Age with patents there's a Renaissance or Athens without them.
The United States was a dramatic mover in technology from its inception as a country. Perhaps it's a coincidence that the US also had a strong notion of patents
See, this is where you should stop: "perhaps it's a coincidence". Maybe look at a real set of data before forming your opinion
My opinion is that lots of things were invented in the 18th century because the use of reason was widely encouraged. I encourage everyone to use reason. Base their opinions on data, that sort of thing
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Well, according to TFA, Bell didn't have a working device until after he received the patent. Now consider that "Successful tests on a German device manufactured in 1863 [...] show the "Telephon", developed by German research scientist Philipp Reis, could transmit and receive speech."
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
The pharmaceutical argument for patents seems to be a fallacy. Read Why Drug Companies Don't Need Patents and On the Necessity of Drug Patents. I think they make some pretty compelling arguments.
So even the old fallback argument for patents is suspect. I'll admit that in some very rare and specific cases, patents provide some benefit for society, but I am convinced at this point that they are a substantial net loss.
Cheers.
It has become apparent to all that there are an enormous number of bogus patents, that patents are frequently used to hinder progress, to create monopoly, stifle competition, and generally impede economic growth. Despite their being bastions of capitalism, it should be noted that it is always in the best interest of the wealthy corporation to interfere with competition-- at the expense of the general public. What's wrong is that we have both laws against anti-competitive behavior (in the form of anti-trust), and then more laws encouraging anti-competitive behavior (in the form of IP law). Worse than that, there are long legal precedents in place stating that if you fail to 'protect' your IP as a CEO, you can be sued by your shareholders. The system is corrupt, and failure to act in a corrupt fashion on the part of a business owner is punishable with civil action, and damn the consequences to society.
At the same time, it seems self-evident that those spending years and/or huge sums of money developing new technology or creating new art MUST have some sort of recompense for their efforts. Hence, we have a need for copyright and patent laws. Certainly noone would suggest that Sony should be able to sell a CD that I made without financially compensating me, the creator of that content, which in any capitalist society is exactly what would happen without IP law. As nice as it is to have every idea in the public domain, it needs to be said that as long as inequity of property exists as the dominant paradigm of commerce, there must be intellectual property, because creative people have as much right to become rich from their ideas as the business people who put those ideas in consumers' hands. The relative merits of capitalism versus communism aren't really pertinent to this discussion, but let it be said that IP is necessary to some degree in this society as it stands.
So what do we do to fix the problem? The question is one of approaching the ideal situation stated by economic theory, represented in this case by the EFF, wherein all ideas are free and public domain, while maintaining the ability to both recoup expenses in devloping those ideas and prevent companies from stealing the fruits of that labor. First, it is absolutely clear that if no money is being made from the use of an IP, then it should be covered under fair use. Hobbyists and scientists alike should have full access to all material, in order to allow progress to march on unimpeded. It's also obvious that the methods involved in the patent office are outdated, arcane, and ineffective. Thus, we need to establish a world foundation for patent law on the internet, with all patents being processed for peer review, where anyone can view patents, quickly and effectively search for existing patents, and file patents with little hassle or expenditure compared to the current system. Patent issues could be handled democratically, the democratic system being an excellent measure of 'non-obvious' as compared to some overworked patent clerk. This brings me to another important point-- the elimination of patent-based monopolies. Instead, a set of guidelines for royalties should be established according to the widespread appeal of a given patent and the degree of resemblance a product based on that patent has (like a patent covering a type of servo used in a robot finger shouldn't entitle the inventor of that servo to 10% of the cost of the robot, just as Wright's patent on Wing Warping shouldn't have given them the right to a 20% royalty on aileron designs, yet a patent on a home teleporter might deserve a royalty of 30%). Additional royalty adjustments should be put in place for improvements on existing designs, and to make up in part for the loss of monopoly power, additional subsidies should be put in place for R&D operations. Additionally, copyright periods should be decreased to 25 years as patents are increased to 25 years, with hefty penalities for breaking what would at that point be very reasonable IP law, instead of the complicated mess currently
I read through numerous posts, all conflicting on how their guy invented, or patented, or had the idea, or blah. Everyone using different defintions, with no logical arguments, just pure emotional jabs, many with seemingly racial or nationalistic bents.
Finally, one post decribing a process, a reason, a relevant issue of the story. Marked troll? I would meta-moderate more often if I believed it would do any good.
I have a feeling that Meucci's mental problems and personal life problems delayed the original patent, but that there is little doubt now that he actually invented the telephone.
It's almost certain that Bell stole the patent for the telephone with a little help from Edward B Grant at Western Union (who kept putting off Meucci's attempts to give a demonstration) and certain individuals at the Patent Office who coincidentally 'lost' Meucci's paperwork. Far from being innovitive, Bell was nothing more than a slimy shit - at least as far as being involved in the actual invention of the telephone is concerned.
The United States started fraud proceedings against Bell, which were only dropped with the death of Meucci in 1896.
And to think it took until 2001 for the US senate to recognize the fact that Meucci did actually invent it. This great milestone would not have been achieved without the deep investigative work of Basilio Catania.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Why Drug Companies don't Need Patents
On the Necessity of Drug Patents
It may be argued that the telephone was invented around 1860 by Antonio Meucci who called it teletrophone.
e phone
Despite a public statement by the then Secretary of State that "there exists sufficient proof to give priority to Meucci in the invention of the telephone," and despite the fact that the United States initiated prosecution for fraud against Bell's patent, the trial was postponed from year to year until, at the death of Meucci in 1896, the case was dropped.
The first American demonstration of Meucci's invention took place in 1860, and had a description of it published in New York's Italian language newspaper. Meucci invented a paired electro-magnetic transmitter and receiver, where the motion of a diaphram modulated a signal in a coil by moving an electromagnet. This resulted in a good fidelity, but a very weak signal. Meucci is also credited with the early invention of the anti-sidetone circuit, and of inductive loading of telephone wires to increase long-distance signals. Unfortunately, serious burns, lack of English and poor business abilities resulted in Meucci failing to develop his inventions commercially in America. Meucci demonstrated some sort of instrument in 1849 in Havana, Cuba, but the evidence is unclear if this was an electric telephone or a variant on the string telephone using wires.
Meucci was born in Florence, Italy. He studied chemical and mechanical engineering at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts and later worked in theatres as a stage technician. Besides electric voice transferral, he invented and patented many devices that were based on chemical and mechanical processes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_tel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Meucci
by Tony Rothman
talks about the telephone and the light bulb and MANY others
There was a telephone installed in the smithstonian that bell knew about, probably saw and may have used
he also talks about bell bribing patent examiners
i guess that that qualifies as 'prior art'
Bah. Why should anyone care what this "Thomas Jefferson" character thinks? He sounds like some kind of slashdot hippie.
Interesting that you mention Victor Hugo, since he was the primary person behind the Berne Convention , which is where we get all those copyrights that stick around for decades after the author's death.
I'm not sure if he is who you want to be quoting on matters of intellectual property if you are interested in "calls for restraint".
It's old news. And for once the U.S. Congress was ahead of public opinion:
1 8/1158240
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/
Actually, I think that in cases like this, that NOBODY should be awarded a patent.
Although the current practice is to award a patent to whoever applies first, I think that the fact that subsequent, substantially similar, patents are applied for before the first one is made public or awarded should be considered a prima facie evidence that the invention is 'obvious'.
Seriously. I understand that obviousness is a slippery thing. Often, the best ideas are the simplest and may seem obvious in retrospect, so the patent office and courts are fairly careful about determining obviousness. However, if two or more inventers independently come up with the same idea at about the same time, then that should be considered proof that the idea was obvious. Since the patent office keeps filings secret until after a patent is awarded, the time between the original filing and the awarding of a patent for the idea is a time when no other inventor could know that a similar idea has been filed. So, another, similar, filing during this period aught to be considered proof that the idea is obvious and non patentable.
A large number of patents would get thrown out if this standard was adopted, but, since it's clear that there is a serious problem with the patent system, I don't think that this would be a bad thing and would actually provide us with a much better system.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Yeah, long before indians became the favourite IT immigrants of the USA an italian (like that other guy... Fermi... and what about Marconi...) invented the first telephone: Meucci. Now, I admit Italy has a healthy history of shitting on it's best minds, up until this very day!, but please admit it, an italian did it. Not that it cost anyone anything, patents are expired and the people involved are dust but please... we're not only Spaghetti, Pizza & Mandolino (e Mafia e Berlusconi... sigh!)... we're good science too!!!!
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
No :) Maybe you should look at other sectors - why not the one I mentioned - and see how cooperation together competition is done there?
it's in my head
Isn't it already broken?
The most dangerous strategy is to jump a chasm in two leaps. - Benjamin Disraeli
Yeah, I lost all respect for him after I read the foreword to "America: The Book."
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Good thing too, or every engineer and Calculus-101 student would have to pay royalties to Al Gore.