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Why Geim Never Patented Graphene
gbrumfiel writes "As we discussed on Tuesday, Andre Geim won this year's Nobel prize in physics for graphene, but he never patented it. In an interview with Nature News, he explains why: 'We considered patenting; we prepared a patent and it was nearly filed. Then I had an interaction with a big, multinational electronics company. I approached a guy at a conference and said, "We've got this patent coming up, would you be interested in sponsoring it over the years?" It's quite expensive to keep a patent alive for 20 years. The guy told me, "We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it's really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us." That's a direct quote.'"
Can't they just patent it anyway, and sue him instead?
He could at least have mentioned which "big, multinational electronics company" he spoke with.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That's a threat to abuse the legal system.
Do that, and he'll spend the rest of his life and gross income fighting interminable libel suits.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I don't get it, he is Russian born and works in Manchester, England. Are they saying $2.2 trillion (nominal GDP of England in 2006) isn't enough to win a patent war? My god, if that's the case, then what is?
This is as fine example as any about how patents help the small business and/or lone inventor.
Y'know, just asking. If this isn't a demand with menaces, it sure the hell ain't kippers.
The interesting part of this is the use of the patent system to prevent an inventor patenting their invention. (You know damn well that the company WILL file patents in ten years anyway and will make gob-loads of money, prior-art not withstanding.) The sole value of a patent system is to ALLOW the inventor to patent their invention. It serves no other function. (The other theoretical value of properly documenting an invention has long-since given up the ghost.) That we now have a verifiable, demonstrable example of patent inversion shows that the system as it stands must be replaced.
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)
As said in the freely available e-book "against intellectual monopoly". I didn't write it, but it's well worth a read.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Corporations, and their masters have become absolutely powerful and absolutely evil. The only thing more absolute is people's denial and greed.
How many people have sold themselves out into corporate slavery?
Now, go as your told, boy.
It also has the largest surface-to-weight ratio: with one gram of graphene you can cover several football pitches (in Manchester, you know, we measure surface area in football pitches).
Can someone put this in terms of American Football fields please? Or perhaps school buses will work...thanks.
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
You CANNOT patent basic elements: Graphene is a form of carbon.
However, you CAN patent a process for using graphene.
Go ahead and mod this post DOWN !
Yours In Akademgorodok,
Kilgore Trout
The dude seems to know where his towel is.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
A soccer field (BrE: football pitch) is 105 by 68 meters, or exactly 0.714 hectare. It's about one and a third U.S. football fields, which are 360 by 160 feet, or 0.5351 ha. So yes, 1 gram of graphene would still cover several football fields (in Indianapolis, you know, we measure surface area in football fields).
isn't his research funded by public money?
Maybe patents use to work 50 years ago. Now it is always the case that the company with deeper pockets always gets its way one way or the other. What really gets to me is the hypocrisy of people saying 'patents protect innovators'. They do not. Patents do anything but protecting innovation.
TFA asks: "Finally, are you one of those Nobel prizewinners who is going to go crazy now that you've won? "
The interviewer probably didn't know that Dr. Geim won the Ig Nobel for levitating a frog.
Between that and the fact that he cited saving taxpayer's money as a reason behind not filing a patent and his Friday experiments (which led to the scotch-tape on graphite) discovery, I think I have a new hero.
Patent System: A system put in place to be manipulated to protect corporate IP while stifling competitive innovation.
Legal System: A corporate asset which is manipulated to keep innovative products from being competitive.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Counter-intuitively, this actually presents a case for stronger patents. A strong, easily enforced patent would allow Geim to secure licenses from companies using graphene without a long or expensive legal battle. Strong patents give individual inventors and startups the leverage they need to compete against established players.
Weak patents favor large, established companies. A single weak patent isn't very useful, but a thousand weak patents can destroy a startup competitor or force a settlement with a large one. The result is that large, established companies will tend to accumulate huge portfolios while preventing startups from flourishing. Startups will tend to hope to be bought up by established companies rather than try to compete on their own. And that's exactly what we see today: comparatively few new, large companies and a lot of established players with large patent portfolios that buy up new competitors and engage in low stakes patent litigation with each other that routinely ends in status quo-preserving settlements and cross-licensing agreements.
Note that strong patents are not mutually exclusive with tougher examination and stricter patentability standards. We can do things like reform the written description and enablement requirements so that patentees are forced to write narrower claims that only cover what they actually invented and not just whatever they could brainstorm or dream up without actually nailing down the particulars. Such reforms are not incompatible with making patents stronger and more easily enforced.
Kill the "big company", with bullets, literally. There is no dialogue with the kind of company that says such things. You do not tell to the bad guy "please, do not shoot me!", you shoot him. Twice.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Rather than look at this as a story about a big electronics company pushing around the little guy, I look at is as the right result reached, no matter by what means. I'm sick of seeing all of the patents that have been issued for things that were not really invented, just found to always exist and be useful. Perhaps they should be entitled to a patent on a fabrication method, on on a particular application (although that second one seems dubious), but not a patent on Graphene itself. That would be like suggesting basic elements could have been patented. Graphene is just a very common form of carbon that has long existed.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Why doesn't "Great Britain" *geographically* encompass Wales, also - isn't it all one island? If GB is the name for the island, as opposed to any of the political entities that share the island, isn't Wales also part of that island?
always will be political. additionally: ANY peace prize will be political, forever. any kind of peace is dictated according to terms. terms are always decided by processes that are political. therefore, the very concept of peace is essentially a political animal
since the peace prize is always political no matter what, then the prize will always bother someone somewhere. therefore, the existence of yourself, someone who is bothered by it, is simply a problem that has no solution. therefore your complaint has no merit, because there is nothing that can be done about your complaint: whiners and gripers will always exist in politics
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yup, indeed. Patents are the modern and scientific equivalent of the "Mutual Assured Destruction" doctrine and its nuclear madness.
only much worse because during the cold war, the nuke-equipped countries kept showing off to each other only through weapon tests, nobody nuked small nuke-less countries on a regular basis just just to kill off competition.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yes, Wales *is* part of Great Britain. GP is incorrect.
Great Britain = England + Wales + Scotland