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Do Patent Laws Really Protect Small Inventors?
whoever57 writes "Patent trolls like to claim that patent laws provide a way that small inventors can create products and benefit financially from their invention. One such inventor faces selling his house, despite inventing a product that has sold tens of millions worldwide. From the article: 'Inventor Trevor Baylis says he faces having to sell his house after failing to make money from his wind up radio and is now calling for the government to step into to protect inventors. “I’ve got someone coming around in the next couple of weeks to do a valuation on my house,” says Trevor Baylis, as he walks into the sitting room of his home on Eel Pie Island, in Twickenham, south-west London. “I’m going to have to sell it or remortgage it – I’m totally broke. I’m living in poverty here.”'"
The question here is incorrect. The premise is whether or not it protects the small investor. Answer is yes. What the small investor can't do is afford a law team to defend the patent. This is the crux of the entire patent problem these days.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
They can't afford a lawyer.
n/t
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
Do Patent Laws Really Protect Small Inventors?
No. Nor have I ever heard anyway claim that as being their primary function. Let's adjust that to say that patent laws are designed to promote innovation and invention by disproportionately reward the production of ideas compared to the actual work and creation being done. This, in theory, helps any size of inventor put in R&D monies to chase a high reward. And, yes, I do think they have been successful to some extent in doing this although there is plenty of evidence that they have gone too far as of late. They've also been applied to things that probably shouldn't be patentable like genes and software.
One such inventor faces selling his house, despite inventing a product that has sold tens of millions worldwide.
Pardon my anecdotal apathy but so what? Plenty of Americans squander money like it's nobody's business. I'd imagine there are tons of engineers out there that are brilliant inventors but either don't want to or fail to deal with money in a responsible manner. Hell, I've recently been collecting sketch card art and just totalled up my last six months spending. What the hell was I thinking?! American athletes can make millions in a single year and still end up penniless before the age of retirement!
From the article: 'Inventor Trevor Baylis says he faces having to sell his house after failing to make money from his wind up radio and is now calling for the government to step into to protect inventors. “I’ve got someone coming around in the next couple of weeks to do a valuation on my house,” says Trevor Baylis, as he walks into the sitting room of his home on Eel Pie Island, in Twickenham, south-west London. “I’m going to have to sell it or remortgage it – I’m totally broke. I’m living in poverty here.”'
Okay so this inventor is house broke -- he's got nice clothes, the article doesn't say he works three jobs. That leaves me a little curious so I inspected the article which had hilarious counter intuitive subtitles:
He built a home on Eel Pie Island in the 1970s for £20,000
Wow! That bit is interesting! So he lives on an island in the Thames in London?! Okay, I'm going to go ahead and gather that property taxes must be insane. Could he afford a house in the country? I mean, is he selling a house that he can no longer afford to buy a house in a cheaper neighborhood or is he genuinely poor? Which is it?
The property also has a pool (Paul Grover)
Uh, okay so add energy and water bills to the above.
The prolific inventor earns money as an after-dinner speaker (Paul Grover)
Okay so, has he tried getting a 9 to 5 job? I hate to be a dick but I don't think you can invent a particular modification of a radio in 1991 and a shoe that charges cell phones among "250 products" and expect to coast through life smoking a pipe and getting a bennie here or there for dinner speeches. I mean, those were the two most notable inventions?
Furthermore how do his business mistakes equate to a breakdown of the patent system:
Due to the quirks of patent law, the company he went into business with to manufacture his radios were able to tweak his original design, which used a spring to generate power, so that it charged a battery instead. This caused him to lose control over the product.
Man, I wish PJ would deconstruct this so I knew what was going on. So what that tells me is that the novel part of his invention was the spring that generated power directly to the radio? And when the company found a different way to do that, they cut him out? Yeah, companies are going to try to screw you anyway they can. The problem is that this screwing could go the opposite way too. I mean, a
My work here is dung.
Eel Pie Island to make sure it was a real place and not some shit Apple Maps invented.
It depends.
On one hand, it seems that a small inventor should be able to develop, market, and sell an invention without a giant corporation coming along, copying the idea, and selling the same thing for cheaper, in higher quantities.
On the other hand, it is damn near impossible to develop, market, and sell an invention today without "infringing" upon untold numbers of patents. Large corporations can play this game with their legal departments and large financial resources, but the small inventor is pretty much fucked.
The only people winning at this game are the lawyers. Follow the money.
It's a sorry and pathetic situation and I hope the western world's economy pays dearly for it in the years to come.
Better evaluations should be built, to differentiate real innovators from patent trolls.
The supposed inventors should leave some kind of economical guarantee, that would be collected by the state, if it's a trivial patent or a troll is detected.
Real innovators would get refunded everything, and would even get tax breaks as a plus for their efforts and the risk they took.
The economical punishment to the rejected patents, must be high enough, to fund the more strict evaluation process, and would serve as a deterrent for patent trolls.
No.
I'm not trying to be sarcastic, but under current U.S. law, it's nearly financially prohibitive to defend against a claim.
At this first to file is utter nonsense, too. Very bad. Let's throw out prior art.
Not entirely related, but in the early 80's I was acquainted with author. He was approached by Disney to turn one of his
books into a movie - paid him cash-money up front, too. Well, he's thinking 1-2 years... Still haven't seen the movie.
There are companies stockpiling ideas out there like Real Estate - except'n they really ain't real. That's were the
current suite of laws have led us - to this incredible stagnation. Oh, it'll take some time before the wheels finally grind
to a halt, but they will....
CAPTCHA = locust - there's never just one...
Taxing the net liquid value of assets at modern portfolio theory's risk free interest rate, rather than taxing economic activity, is the way out of this abominable situation in which independent inventors are put through the meat-grinder.
Of course, the wealthy will oppose this in every way since they currently benefit from the protection of their property rights without having to pay for that protection, while those producing wealth pay the taxes.
This means political solutions are out of the question.
So, rather than having the corrupt, evil, stupid and/or ignorant drag down the rest of us into political economic Hell, all inventors should demand sortoracy: Sorting proponents of political theories into governments that test them.
Seastead this.
Patents are only worth the legal protection you can provide to defend it. If you send a cease and desist letter to a large corporation because they're infringing your patent, the typical response will be "We see your patent and raise you one thousand lawyers."
Uh, "No".
Here, the patent laws functioned exactly as designed. He got protection for what he disclosed. His patent encouraged further innovation around his limited disclosure. The portable electronic-buying public is better off for having more choice. If he's losing money to devices which do not infringe his patent, tough titties. If a court were to extend his protection to aspects not disclosed in his patent, then HE would be the patent troll.
The only failure here is a lack of imagination by him, his patent attorney, and the author of TFA.
One of my college professors liked to point out it really just gives you a license to litigate. His relative had a patent, and was approached by a large firm to license it. When they thought the price was too high, they simply used it without permission, knowing he lacked the funds to litigate.
In practice patents no longer protect small developers unless they have cash.
The summary has a terrible bias, and has nothing to do with small inventors being steamrolled by patent troll portfolios. What this article is actually about is someone patenting an exceedingly trivial idea (storing energy in a windup mechanism to deliver that energy to some device; an idea and implementation that has been around for at least a century), and complaining that his trivial rehash of an old idea was used by another company with the resources to actually produce said trivial products.
Now he wants his government to criminalize the use of ancient ideas if he can't make money off of them. He isn't a small inventor; he is a con artist trying to steal from the public domain.
Radios with a generator charger aren't new. I had one in the 1980s, and they go back at least to WWII. The problem was that no battery charging occurs unless you're cranking hard enough to get the generator voltage above the battery voltage. Then you have to have a governor or voltage limiter to prevent overvoltaging the battery. So you have to crank at just the right speed, and there has to be a mechanism to enforce this.
So this guy used a clockwork mechanism with a big spring to power a small generator, which was more convenient. You can wind fast, or you can wind slow; it doesn't matter. Then it occurred to others that DC voltage conversion isn't hard any more, and it's straightforward to build a charger that will work off whatever is coming from the generator. So you get rid of the clockwork and replace it with a crank generator, switching power supply and battery. The OLPC has a gadget like that.
A patent is not a substitute for a viable business model. One cannot simply receive a patent and wait for the money to roll in, especially not as technology changes around you, quite often in order to work around your patent.
In this case, in 1991 Baylis invented a generator that was based on storing energy in a spring, then using a system of gears to release that energy steadily to power various devices such as a radio. But by 1995 wind-up radios were on their way out and by 2000 they had been entirely replaced by battery-based radios. His invention was a flash in the pan.
So Baylis had a nice idea, made some decent money off of it, but failed to turn that into a sustainable career. Now he wants the entire UK patent system modified in order to rescue him from his misfortune.
Trevor Baylis came up with a neat idea and patented it: turn a handle to wind up a clockwork spring and let the spring turn an alternator to generate a small current for a few minutes. He made wind-up radios, got money from them and became moderately famous in the UK. If you wanted to make a wind-up radio, you had to license the patent and pay Baylis a royalty.
Then some more innovation happened. Someone realised that turning a handle connected directly to an alternator could charge a battery. And idea was ages old so no patents needed. So they could make a wind-up radio without having to pay Baylis a royalty.
This is how the patent system is supposed to work.
Read the article. The items being sold today aren't the ones he owned rights to and the article has a claim that he sold his interests in the company that is now making them. His design had a wind-up key that ran a clockwork that provided power. The current design has a handcrank that winds to charge a battery that then runs the radio. These are NOT the same design and while being made by the same company I'm not sure he would have any rights to the income from it.
The only part of the story that rings weird to me is a statement that his now obsolete (?) patent was incorporated. Obsolete isn't the right word but I'm not going to reread for the exact quote but it pretty much seemed to say that his patent had somehow expired. If this was done in the 90s that seems awfully short for that to have happened - at least in the US and yes I noticed this was in the UK.
So what exactly is he expecting to be the remedy? Someone like himself has an idea and gets paid for life by everyone? I dunno', I'm not convinced on the basis of this article that he has somehow been horribly wronged or ripped off - particularly if he voluntarily sold off his interest in the company that's doing so well.For that matter - is that company doing well? Millions of sales do not always mean huge profits either.
A Patent doesn't protect an inventor, it protects the idea! If the inventor can't sell, market or project his idea then it's not the systems fault they go broke. Blaming the patent for not working doesn't give the inventors a sense of business. inventors can't just be tech guys, they need to also be buisness guys
He said it himself:
"“I was very foolish. I didn’t protect my product properly and allowed other people to take my product away."
He was foolish. Enough said. If you don't take advantage of the laws and protections that you're afforded, and then you get screwed, it's not a failing of the laws, it's a failing of the inventor.
Speaking as an inventor with six patents, it's hard to enforce a patent until you have $100 million in infringing activity. In practice, almost everybody who gets a royalty deal gets about 5%, +- 2%. (There's a whole theory of IP valuation, but it's not taken very seriously.) So 5% of $100 million is $5 million. Expect legal fees of about $2 million. So you make about $3 million, best case. It's fully taxable, so you get to keep about $2 million. The odds of winning a patent case are about 30%-40%, So the expectation is about $700K on $100,000,000 in infringement.
I've licensed two patents. One I swapped for stock in a startup, and that came out very well. There I wrote one of the startup's products. A straight licensing deal on another made me about $400K after taxes; that was partly about getting my product off the market so it didn't compete with theirs. I'm working on licensing the other patents.
Using human power to drive tiny appliances is hardly new. It might be a bicycle with an old fashioned generator touching the wheel or a charger that powers a battery on any other device. Simply adding a radio and packaging it and the generator together is hardly worthy of patent in my humble opinion.
Had a great uncle who worked for Tidewater for 45 years.
He created several patents for oil recovery methods, and helped develop the Venezuelan Oil fields. Today, his patents are used for recovery of 90% of planet earth's oil recovery. His Patents were honored to him by the patent office, William M. Harrison. But that did not stop Patent trolls by the largest of corporations. He fought so long that by the time he won, his patents were a moot point, and could be used by anyone. Their were casualties, the Judge in the case(s) DISBARRED the Lawyers involved from ever practicing law in the State of Texas for all time, due to the sheer level or corruption.
Justice was not served. He only wanted $1 per barrel for Royalties... If it wasn't due to Greedy hands, he would of been the Richest man of all time on earth, the first Trillionaire. In short when level of greed this high, Plus patent trolling, no small business entrepreneur can cope or meek out a reward, if the system can be corrupted.
It's not a matter of where in the Patent application system that went wrong, but what level of money, greed, and profit that defines where...
-This is my Family History so their is no higher form of backing up of this information can be provided (short of the patent #'s)
I'm sure most will be complaining about patent laws but the problem is what's the alternative? Already Chinese businesses can have a knock off on the market weeks after you launch then flood the market. The joke is if you have it made in China there's an excellent chance the knock off will come out of the same factory using your tools. What option other than surrender does a small inventor have? For years now at best you had a year before a completing product and now I'd say it's 1 to 3 months. Considering most items will have a 3 to 5 year payback before they go into profits it's almost impossible to succeed without large sums of cash.
The purpose of the patent system in the 21st century is for big businesses to keep small competitors out of the field. If the inventor gets anywhere from it, that's nice to advertise, but it's nothing to do with what it's for.
It's like copyright. If it benefits the actual artists, that looks good in the advertising, but if it ever does happen it's strictly a side-effect - it exists to benefit the publishers.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Lets say someone invents the best thing ever, better than anything you could imagine. This thing will make people want to be with you, or leave you alone, as your preference. It will make food taste better, and you will be happy for the rest of your life if you use this thing. This person gets a patent on it, and sets up a factory to build these things. This person has a perfect business plan, the product price includes the R&D costs, some blue sky, and he pays employees a fair wage.
Evil company X decides this product is easy to make (they read the patent, it was easy to figure out) so they set up a factory across the street, and sell the same thing at a lower price. They don't have any R&D (other than a read of the patent), they pay lower wages, and use cheaper packaging.
No big deal you say, he has a patent on it. Ok, he calls his lawyer, and says, I need an injunction, and I want an infringement suit and I want treble damages. Law being a civil profession, his lawyer calls the evil companies lawyer, and they go to lunch (which our hero is paying for). His lawyer comes back, and says evil company X wants to go to trial. Our hero believes he will win, so of course he says yes, lets do it, we will get the injunction, and treble damages, I'll borrow money from whoever to pay for this adventure.
The lawyers all have a few more lunches (not at McDonalds I can assure you), and they chat and scheme, and make a court date. Aha, in 7 months, there will be an initial trial to determine if the injunction can happen.
During the 7 months, our hero has to sell his house borrow against the factory, lay off employees and pay the rest a little less. Evil company X announces a HUGE profit, and is setting up a second factory in Europe. The evil CEO now wants to live in France to educate his daughter, so he buys a chateau.
Well the trial happens, and sure enough, our hero wins the injunction. Cool, now it is on to the civil phase, and the trial for the damages is scheduled for 9 months from now. The customers have all but forgotten our hero's products, and he doesn't have any money to advertise, or build new products, it is all tied up in lawyer fees (and lunches).
Well, dang, evil company X has also run out of money, since they could sell anything, and they have this factory, and a second one in Europe, lawyers and employees to pay. But the CEO didn't sell his chateau, or stop educating his daughter, he just let the corporation file chapter 7 sells the factories to pay the lawyers, while he kept his money separate. He has partnered with some middle eastern investors and is helping them start a lesser evil company Y that makes the same product. This lesser evil company will use a factory in France and build a new factory in India, selling all over Europe and Asia importing the product into the US.
The civil trial begins against evil company X, and no one from evil company X shows up. The judge rules in favor of our hero, awarding them 80 bazillion dollars, which becomes 240 bazillion dollars because it was willful infringement. Our hero is happy, and asks his lawyer to begin collection. The lawyer finds that evil company X has filed chapter 7 liquidation, and has no assets, so there will only be a judgment against them, but no real money will change hands. Because the liquidation happened before the civil judgement, it will be difficult to get anything.
Meanwhile lesser evil company Y is importing this wonderful product into the US advertising and selling in the same stores as our hero's product. Our hero asks his lawyer to get another injunction, but this lawyer is no fool, wants his money up front still. Our hero doesn't have the assets to get any more money.
Yes our hero was right, the patent protected him from honest people. The patent system doesn't protect anyone from a dishonest company. The legal system is slow, and painful. It can take years to be proven right, but still never see any money for being right.
Trevor Bayliss is considered something of a British hero for his inventions. He gets wheeled out on TV whenever they want to portray the classic eccentric British inventor (and whenever James Dyson is too busy). The fact that he's broke will surprise a lot of people.
But to be honest, he shouldn't be this position -- he has sufficient public image that he ought to be able to make a living on the public speaking circuits. Okay, so he wouldn't get the kind of money from it that Tony Blair is raking in, but he ought to be able to keep the wolves from the door. (for 'wolves', read 'estate agents')
Why don't we amend patent laws such that a condition of being granted a patent is to have an implementing product on the market within a certain period of time (say, 6 months or a year). If the patent holder fails to come through, the patent is then voided. Same rule applies for patents transferred or sold to others.
Apparently he seems to think that he should be able to live forever on the royalties from that single 20 year old patent.
He probably has friends in the music industry.
It seems to me the gentleman is a poor money manager and that's the real root of his troubles.
Condense the human interest story down, and what you have isn't entirely surprising: It's the story of an inventor who has decent enough technical skills to invent, but not the business skill to successfully profit from his invention. He has a patent, yes - but the patent does him no good because it is narrow enough that an alternative technology came along.
I'm sure I'm legally simplifying the issue, but as best I can see his patent is for a mechanism that uses human power to wind up a clockwork mechanism to drive a compact dynamo. When batteries got more practical and cheaper, the 'clockwork' part was no longer needed. Now, if he were a businessman he would have made the patent as over-broad as he could and patented 'a mechanism for generating electrical energy from human input' or something like that, along with 'human powered radio,' 'human powered torch,' 'human powered general purpose charger' and so on.
People here might start looking for some middle ground: A way to legislate patents broad enough to protect lone inventors, but not so broad as to be useable. But this middle ground doesn't always exist. It doesn't in this case, because what he invented isn't really that great. All he did was take a hand-wound clockwork mechanism (Older than steam!) and connect it to a little dynamo (If Faraday patented that, it's expired). It doesn't exist in the more general case because, outside of some highly specialised areas*, most 'inventions' can be easily re-implemented using alternative designs - and the only way to stop that happening is to allow patents so broad they don't cover technology, but concepts. Putting us back in troll-friendly territory where we are today.
The problem isn't in the implimentation of patents. It's in the concept. It just doesn't work very well. A fundamentally flawed idea. Perhaps we need to get over this idea that the 'lone inventor' has a right to benefit from their work. It sounds great to our sense of fairness, but what it really comes down do is an exclusive right: There's a social cost to making patents half-way effective, and the innovation that results from giving inventors a financial incentive can be very easily outweighed by the innovation lost when small or medium entities are unable to enter the field at all because some sharp businessman realized he can file patents on things broad enough that they are impossible not to infringe** or trivial and numerous enough that they can be used to wage a financial war of attrition against any competitors***.
*Where the implementation is the invention, such as in drugs... and even then, a rival could probably find a similar molecule that shares the same or close-enough functional area.
**One of the ones in the h264 pool describes the concept of a program that accepts video input and outputs the video in encoded form. Not any internal implementation, or even clever maths. They patented the very idea of an encoder. It could probably be invalidated by prior art, but that's the point of a patent pool: There are so many, no-one could afford to fight them all.
*** Rounded corners, swipe to unlock.
It's far past when I should be sleeping on a normal night, and I was up until 5am last night playing Re-Volt with friends. I'm probably going to look over this rambling tomorrow and be unable to figure out what I was trying to say.
I remember this guy. I'v seen him ~6 years ago on Discovery channel boasting how lovely and wonderful patents are. He was some kind of inventor mentor advising young aspiring makers on how to monetize. His first advice was to Patent the shit out of everything. When they asked about his successful inventions he showed a bunch of useless (but patented) garbage and the radio. He was already kind of a joke back then.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I read an article a while back about Sandy Stein who invented a clip that held car keys in a purse so they would not disappear in the vast clutter in the bottom of the purse. It was a very simple clip with an attachment point for a decorative feature. She planned ahead and obtained a utility patent on the concept. She then got a series of design patents on each different version with the different decorative features. This product has sold very well. Because the patents were done well and the decorative features are also protected she has had no problems with ripoffs of her idea. From Article: "Such successful ideas are targets for thieves, but Sandy’s preparation paid off. One notorious knockoff specialist confided to her that he had wanted to copy her product, but “her patent was just too strong and well-written to get around.” Another copycat did try and, for his efforts, lost an infringement case. Sandy agrees that protecting her idea with a patent was the key to the Finders Key Purse staying in the market and remaining successful." http://www.uspto.gov/inventors/independent/eye/201206/sparkofgenius.jsp
The question is alright.
The 'Large Investors' have gamed the current system.
Likely that the Large Investors will pull their strings in Congress to make sure that the 'New' system does exactly for them what the old system does today.
There is no 'Change' only the illusion of 'Change'.
Most people don't have the resources to spend their days inventing, nevermind properly patenting and defending their patent. A lot of companies LITERALLY have you selling you life away to work for the right to work for them, (as in they claim right to EVERYTHING an employee produces, whether on the job, or not, or even tagentally related to their job or not). Further, even if something gets patented, a lot of companies won't make any attempt to produce it, just use it to bolster their patent porfolio.
We need a system where inventors automatically have the rights to their inventions, even if paid to research it for large companies. The best way would be to add a standardized royalty, say 5% of the final selling price for the product. The company would have first dibs on licencing the product, but if they take longer then a couple years to bring it to market, they lose all exclusivity rights. The exact same rules could be applied to artists.
The whole point of IP laws are to maximize public usage AND payment to the creator. Unfortunately, IP laws have started as the province of deep pockets, not creators, and have only gotten worse.
The correct answer is: Hell NO!
It's costs too much to defend, bigger companies can just out sue you with 50000 patents they are holding. You'll be left with no patents, no money, and no business.
Should patent law protect stupid inventors from their own mistakes?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Patents are a corrupt tool, for greedy rich people. Nobody else can afford to use them as an offensive weapon.
I don't see any reason to have patents at all. The original idea was to protect inventions for a short period, while encouraging the inventor to make their discovery public. Now patents are just abused, to crush competition, and greedy parasites have created all sorts of non-sensical patents (eg. on software), that are just used for blackmail, or to impede competition.
In light of this catastrophic failure of the patent system, and the ridiculous duration of patents (25 years!), it seems better to just abolish the whole system.
One must remember that the greatest period of economic growth in the United States, corresponded to the period during which, no patents existed.
Indeed, if this were actually how patents worked all the time, the patent system wouldn't be such a bitch.
Say the guy spent years figuring out the optimal way to do every part of his invention -- the best energy storage device, the best radio reception circuits, etc. Then he patented it. People would then be prevented from recreating his exact design, but still free to create wind-up radios. However, since his design was ideal, theirs would necessarily be inferior.
Patents usually work the other way. Someone comes up with a vague idea like "wind up radio," writes the vaguest patent claims possible in order to patent not just their invention, but the entire concept, then they let someone else figure out the best way to make the whole thing work, like realizing that storing the energy in a battery works better than storing it in a spring. Then they expect the system to ensure they're well off just because they were presumably the first person to think that a wind-up radio would be a nice thing to have (though in reality they certainly weren't) even though the device they came up with was sub-optimal in many ways.
I'm not saying that sub-parts of an invention are a bad idea. Say just one part of his invention was some new novel way to store energy. Obviously that could be patented by itself, and used for many different things. However, it's absurd to say that he invented a wind-up radio that stored its energy in a spring, and that his patent should cover wind-up radios storing their energy in other ways, simply because he realized he could store energy in other ways. Indeed, as wind-up technology already existed as an energy source, and radio technology already existed, one has to ask what exactly it was he invented, because if we're just going to allow combinations of things, then we need patents to be far more specific. Just like we don't allow someone to copyright the concept of a dog and a cat in a single photograph, we shouldn't allow someone to patent the simple idea of putting together two already-existing technologies without doing anything new with them other than putting them together.
Obviously a simple idea like that shouldn't enable someone to pay for their house, so I can't say I feel sorry the guy's patent is useless. If anything, this article simply demonstrates that the patent system works just fine, as long as the patent holders are poor.
Sorry, I don't sympathise with this guy.
:- "Even major companies like Apple have suffered from their technology being copied by Chinese firms"
FTFA
Technology like rounded corners. That is when I lost my last shred of sympathy
He invented a radio with a clockwork motor driving a dynamo. The company (of which he sold his share) subsequenty manufactured radios with batteries charged by hand-turning a dynamo. Sounds far more than a "tweak" to me. Which part of his patent does he think they infringed - the handle? The dynamo? or the radio? - I have heard of all those things before. The combination of those things? - they did not use that combination of things.
I remember this guy on TV, with Mandela who was welcoming it. Of course Mandela would, as would enable him to broadcast his spin to his remote population.
Keeping it short, NO (allow me to save some bytes in this rough economy!)
I'm trying to get modded "Interesting Flamebait Informative and Insightful Redundant Troll" *-* Please Help *-*
It is simply not true that Trevor’s Intellectual property was ripped off or copied in any way, by Freeplay or anybody else.
* Trevor conceived the idea of a mechanically powered radio.
* Trevor formed, and was a shareholder in, a company called Baylis Generators limited.
* This company registered a patent covering Trevor’s concept of a “clockwork” radio.
* The company Baygen, later called Freeplay, was founded to develop, make and distribute the radio in 1994/5 in Cape Town South Africa.
* Baygen/Freeplay paid a royalty to Trevor’s company for the use of the patent.
* Freeplay made radios covered by Trevor’s patent until about 2000.
* In addition to receiving a royalty, Trevor received a consulting fee from Freeplay.
* Technology moved on and the spring based clockwork radio became out-dated. The new technology was to recharge a battery via a generator. A large number of Chinese manufacturers ( we are talking about 100 + different companies) entered the market and “wind-up” products using this simple method proliferated. Trevor’s patent became out-dated, and the whole market was flooded by these cheap Chinese products. These in no way contravened Trevor’s patent, or any of Freeplay’s efforts at technology development. It was a free-for-all, with new ideas, and the competition was heavy.
* Trevor sold his shares in the company that held the original patent, and this company was eventually absorbed into Freeplay.
* Trevor moved on to found another company Trevor Baylis Brands plc. Trevor sourced many different products from China, and branded them under his own name. He marketed them on his own website and through other channels. Trevor refers to this range of products in his marketing material as “Next Generation”, and Trevor became an enthusiastic, independent player in the next generation of “wind-up” products, actively endorsing the next generations’ virtues and improvements.
* Freeplay continued to develop technology, and focussed on innovation and quality products. It maintains its reputation for integrity, quality and as the premium brand in the sector.
So fuck him, right, they just "shared" it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
If patents are to encourage innovation, they are utter fail. If they are to encourage litigation, they are a perfect success.
Seriously, little fish get burned both ways. Little fish can never stop big companies. Even if they win, they never win as much as the big companies make off of the violation.
Big companies can stop little fish if its at all similar. And Big companies will often obscond with ideas that are ridiculous or long invented, and sue a little company (or even a rival Big company).
Apple's lawsuit is probably the most recent perfect example. Not a single invention, sues rival, when every single aspect existed prior.
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however this has changed as the inventor usually ends up giving up his invention to a mega corporation he works for. So at this point patents are used solely to sue someone either into large sums of money or out of business.
Only 'flamers' flame!
"Furthermore, RCA also claimed invention of FM radio and won its own patent on the technology. A patent fight between RCA and Armstrong ensued. RCA's momentous victory in the courts left Armstrong unable to claim royalties on any FM receivers, including televisions, which were sold in the United States. The undermining of the Yankee Network and his costly legal battles brought ruin to Armstrong, by then almost penniless and emotionally distraught. Eventually, after Armstrong's death, many of the lawsuits were decided or settled in his favor, greatly enriching his estate and heirs. But the decisions came too late for Armstrong himself to enjoy his legal vindication."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstrong#FM_radio
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
http://www.tinaja.com/glib/casagpat.pdf
"Over the years, I have seen hundreds of examples of money machine people being severely done in by the patent system. Even murdered by it in several heart-attack-during-litigation cases. And not once did I see anyone approaching the patent system on a small scale basis and profiting from it. Ever. Once again: Unless you are well within a Fortune 500 context, any and all involvement in the patent system in any, shape, or form is absolutely certain to cause you the net loss of time, energy, money, and sanity. Besides ending up a totally useless and utterly unnecessary psychic energy sink." http://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/ismm.pdf
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Getting a patent is easy. The USPTO give away patents without a fight. If they frown, you just dump more paperwork on them. If you have read patent filings, they are indecipherable. Pure bullshit and gobbledygock. Seriously. You can twist them to mean anything. So the USPTO shrugs and grants it anyway.
Thing is, and this is important, the courts are the second half of the process. There is a big difference between being granted a patent and having it stand up in court. Courts are incredibly expensive. Your patent is a vanity plate unless you have $2M to sue someone for COUGH COUGH violating it. If you are a big company this is chicken feed and a nice way around anti-trust laws APPLE APPLE APPLE. If you are small patent owner then there are troll lawyers out there. They will buy a patent, troll the shit out of victims and give you a cut if they draw blood. Sounds good? Well remember they are lawyers and it will serve you right if they fuck you over too.
BTW who was the asshole founding father who put patents in the constitution?
This is just an obvious assembly of two existing concepts, three with the battery. Putting together existing devices or concepts does not make an invention, only a product.
I've seen this guy a few years back on Discovery Channel and I laughed my ass off.
"an invention is unpatentable if it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art"
Anyone with minimal knowledge in mechanics and electronics can think about a radio powered by a hand crank. No one has had the nerve to patent it because it's OBVIOUS it can be done, and there is no RESEARCH needed, and also there IS NO MARKET for it.
I have inherited a torch with a hand crank made in USSR from my grandfather and he died in 1984 .. and the god dam thing was old
I've seen a radio that was powered by thermocouples placed on a gas lamp (and it was a commercial product)
So there were other people to try to power small devices from something else than a battery.
His only "merit" is that he "found" the market in African countries. In my opinion he is just a patent troll who wasn't able to make it.