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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.”'"
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.
Not quite. His invention was storing the energy from the wind up in an efficient spring design. It was not the wind-up part itself. The manufacturer changed it to a battery system and cut him out. That is it. Even under his proposed solutions, which include a novelty requirement and much longer terms to patents, he wouldn't be covered. This is because his improvement was from cruddy batteries to a clockwork type spring system; their improvement was from clockwork type spring system to modern batteries. So, for him to win, you need to argue that the switch from battery to spring was a novel change, such that it is a completely different product, but the change from spring back to battery was not, such that it is a completely different product. I don't see how a rational person could say that one is and the other isn't.
Ok. So someone invented this thing called a virtual shopping cart. Another company "tweaked" the code slightly and had a shopping cart themselves. This sounds familiar. So which is right? You can tweak it? You can't Tweak it? How much Tweaking is a new design?
I think I read about this on /. actually. I think some people might have even said the person claiming to have the original idea was a patent troll? I'm not saying which side is right. I don't know if I have an answer honestly. But you have to think, isn't the exact same argument?
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein