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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."
You are the least insightful anonymous coward ever.
-- $G
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.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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.
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.
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.