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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 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.