Woz and the RCA Character-generator Patent

doperative writes with this quote from Steve Wozniak: "A lot of patents are pretty much not worth that much ... In other words, any fifth-grader could come up with the same approach ... And then we find out RCA has a patent on a character generator for any raster-scanned setup .. And they patented it at a time when nobody could have envisioned it really being used or anything ... and they got five bucks for each Apple II, based on this little idea that's not even an idea. Y'know: store the bits, store the bits, then pop in a character on your TV."

Comments

store twice, then pop??

[mehrotra.akash]

Could someone explain to me why we store twice before popping??

"store the bits, store the bits, then pop in a character on your TV."

Don't stop at Paul Allen

[elrous0]

He might also want to have a word with his old buddy Steve Jobs too. Apple has been getting meaningless patents left and right, just like MS and all these other corps. And at least Allen and Gates are using some of their ridiculous money for charity. What exactly has Jobs been doing to innovate, or contribute to the world?

I love Woz, but if he's going to criticize, he needs to include his old friends and not just his old enemies.

Re:Don't stop at Paul Allen

[smitty97]

You're right! Here's a photo of one of Allen's charities:

http://d2omthbq56rzfx.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Megayacht-Octopus-plus-Paul-Allen.jpg

Re:Don't stop at Paul Allen

[Idbar]

This article seems like pure FUD. I know we all here hate the patent system, but doesn't every patent becomes "obvious" once someone invented it?

Of course, once someone shows an invention to the world, there's no the know-how to re-produce the thing.

On top of that, there's this Apple co-founder complaining about MS suing everyone, when Apple has been suing around all this past months. This is just an attempt to make Apple look like "good guys" and keep throwing the dirty water on MS.

Re:Don't stop at Paul Allen

[yeshuawatso]

You know, I thought I was going to be able to challenge the remark about Jobs' philanthropic endeavors, but every time I searched, the answer was the same: he doesn't do charity. An article came close to something, but it was only how Jobs was pushing legislation for CA to require people be asked to be an organ donor when getting a license or having it renewed. I understand that this could be in some way helpful to CA residents that need transplants, but considering that Steve was a recipient of a donated organ, it only seems like he's trying to fulfill his own selfish goals of not having to fly around the country just to be put on multiple donor lists.

Until today, I never once thought corporate social responsibility was important, even though I've spent a many nights defining such programs in college for my BBA. However, when your net worth is greater than $5 billion, you're the deity of overpriced computers, and your entire market is the upper middle to upper class who give to causes regularly, it seems like you are in the best position to find a cause that your followers can get behind and you demonstrate your leadership in helping those less fortunate than yourself. And forcing your employees to volunteer their time but you yourself are too arrogant to get off your ass and grab a trash bag to help cleanup an urban park is a slap in the face. I've never felt more disgusted writing a post from my iPad until today.

Thank you for opening my eyes.

Re:Don't stop at Paul Allen

[gauauu]

I had one idiot... I mean coworker go to our boss and say, "Things are kinda slow. Do you have something for me to work on?" He was let go on Thursday.

That's so stupid it makes me angry. You have an employee actively looking for more work to do -- why would you let that person go? That's the kind of person you want to keep around. Instead let go the lazy people who sit at their desks watching youtube videos pretending to look busy. If you're really good at getting your work done, you'll almost always run into a slow point somewhere in your job. The proper solution is to let your manager know you've churned through the current work, and then find something proactive to do until you and your manager figure out what's next. Which sounds like what this guy was doing.

Re:Don't stop at Paul Allen

[david duncan scott]

Last I heard your boss's job is to delegate the work assigned to him. Assigning that work to you is precisely his job, and if you insist on doing it for him, I'd suggest going after his paycheck as well--apparently he's not earning it..

Besides which, you might end up looking pretty silly if you assign to yourself the work that your boss already knew was superfluous or even erroneous this month and you didn't even bother to check. Sometimes eager beavers dam up the wrong streams.

Re:So uhh

[salesgeek]

You are the least insightful anonymous coward ever.

Looks patentable to me

[cpu6502]

RCA's patent dates to an era (1940s) when just putting an image on a screen was a challenge, and overlaying it with characters was like magic.

They deserved the credit for putting letters on 50s-era TVs just as much as they deserved credit for developing NTSC-II (i.e. color). If you put in years of effort into experimentation, you deserve the reward of a temporary monopoly on your discovery. IMHO.

Re:So uhh

[skywire]

Often, once a question or problem arises, the answer is obvious. The problem may not be obvious; it may not yet have arisen many if any times, Nevertheless, the solution is obvious, and when presented with the problem and a description of the elements of the problem, any reasonably intelligent fifth-grader with a modicum of arithmetic skills would figure out the solution -- often the only or at least most elegant solution, the one that no-one would fail to arrive at. Such solutions are not supposed to be patentable. You are applying the obviousness test to the wrong thing.

Nobody could have envisioned it?

[Theaetetus]

"And they patented it at a time when nobody could have envisioned it really being used or anything ...

Seems like it wasn't obvious, then.

and they got five bucks for each Apple II, based on this little idea that's not even an idea. Y'know: store the bits, store the bits, then pop in a character on your TV."

The Apple II originally sold for $1298 with 4k of RAM and $2638 with 48k. $5 is only .3% of the price. That doesn't seem that unreasonable.

Also, if it was so unreasonable, and was just a little idea "that's not even an idea," why not just design around it?

The RCA character-generator patent was an example of a patent, from Wozniak's point of view, that the aforementioned fifth-grader could have come up with. "I don't know any other way you could do it

That's why... He couldn't come up with any other way. So, the reasonable royalty now seems really reasonable.

Re:So uhh

[k_187]

Because there's a good chance that just paying the 5 bucks was cheaper. Wikipedia says that between 5 and 6 million Apple II's were sold. Assuming 5.5 million were sold and that all of them are affected by this patent, that's 27.5 million over 16 years as opposed to a patent lawsuit up front and missing out on the first few years of sales.

obviousness

[robbarrett]

As someone who has done a fair bit of inventing and patenting, I find generalized disdain for patented inventions to be a little irritating. (This is apart from arguments about whether intellectual property is a proper category or whether its legal protection is a good idea). Yes, many patents may have titles that make them sound trivial, and quick reads of them may make you snigger. But in the U.S., one criterion for ruling against patentability is that "the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains" (35 U.S.C. 103 (A)). I think most of my patent submissions have been initially rejected as "obvious" (one particularly entertaining case was a patent examiner's note that the shape of the recording elements in my magnetic head bore remarkable similarity to a piece of plastic someone had devised to keep a garden hose from snagging on the tire while you're washing your car). However, arguing against an "obviousness" claim is straightforward:

1. Prove that the problem has been recognized for some time;
2. Show that engineers have attempted a variety of solutions to the known problem;
3. Clearly explain how your own invention's method for solving the problem is different from existing solutions.

Of course, this doesn't do anything to prove that the invention is useful, actually does solve the problem, can be reduced to practical form, etc. It just demonstrates that the invention was not obvious at the time. It also does not mean the inventor is a genius or that nobody else on the planet could come up with the solution. It just means that it may qualify to be a patentable invention.

My own favorite case of proving non-obviousness to myself was having a renowned engineer in the field look at my proposal and tell me that he was quite sure it could not possibly work, though he could not exactly explain why. A couple of weeks later we met in the hall with him telling me that he had been intrigued enough to run simulations while I was building a prototype. We both came to the conclusion that it indeed could and did work.

Lots of crazy stuff gets patented all the time, but the process of describing and justifying an invention as such is...not completely obvious.

Re:So uhh

[rickb928]

This, good sir, is the essence of much excellent engineering. The solution, once discovered, is obvious.

Finding the obvious is all the work.

And just an aside, but since titling was probably a nasty bit of work in early television, RCA would have been thinking about how to do this in a much better way than printed cards held up to the camera. RCA was inventing LCDs in 1962. A character generator concept would have been 'obvious' then, and the application to television not far behind in hindsight. Patent 33456458 was issued in 1963, patent 3426344 filed in 1967, somewhat contemporaneous with LCD development. Woz is off-base on this one. Not much, but he is off-base.

Besides, the hope that RCA wasn't exploring television technology in the 60s is a faint hope indeed. Their LCD work was prescient, superceded only by Sharp and their success in making it commercially viable.