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The Man Who Created the Pencil Eraser and How Patents Have Changed
fermion writes "This weeks 'Who Made That' column in The New York Times concerns the built in pencil eraser. In 1858 Hymen Lipman put a rubber plug into the wood shaft of a pencil. An investor then paid about 2 million in today's dollars for the patent. This investor might have become very rich had the supreme court not ruled that all Lipmen had done was put together two known technologies, so the patent was not valid. The question is where has this need for patents to be innovative gone? After all there is the Amazon one-click patent which, after revision, has been upheld. Microsoft Activesync technology patent seems to simply patent copying information from one place to another. In this modern day do patents promote innovation, or simply protect firms from competition?"
erased his patent i'll just see myself to the exit
In this modern day patents simply protect firms from competition.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
that the foxes have taken over the hen houses.
Into the hands of lobbyists, who paid for legislators to make it a pay-to-play activity.
I'm working on a patented drinking fountain water filter that will be required by law for use in all public schools, hospitals and train stations - it will also be a law that they must be replaced every 30 days with a recycling fee paid to franchised non-profit companies staffed only by the homeless.
Lawyers and lobbyists have come a long way since 1858; with enough lawyers and lobbyists today, ScrewCorp could patent a pencil colored yellow.
He who has the gold makes the rule.
I doubt that it was different back then, only that fewer companies saw the value in rigging the patent system and claiming them like claiming a gold mine. It's a pretty "advanced" technique and requires a lot of money backing you.
At least some corporation, preferably a couple thereof.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In this modern day do patents promote innovation, or simply protect firms from competition?
Asking the question is giving the answer. Wealthy firms had enough lawyers to kink the law by landmark rulings. The fact that the People cannot get this fixed by the legislator after decades is a hint that democracy is sick
not original work. denied.
One click is one of the most ridiculous because the cookie mechanism that it relies upon was put into the browser specifically for the purpose of enabling transactions that use an additional record in the database (e.g. containing payment and shipping info) without additional input from the user.
"Service economy" with IP fantasy led to this bullshit world for the West and other developed countries.
And it would. Bureaucratic, parasitic, loophole-exploiting endeavors like lawyering, bankering, lobbying are most rewarded.
The West is rotting from within.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Oh where do I begin to describe the skewed perspective of this article. It seems clear the author had recently read the book "The Pencil" and thought they could write up a little tidbit about it with patents. But, when you start doing the math, it really falls through. The "invention" was created in 1858. The supreme court ruling about the patent came in 1875, nearly 20 years later (so at the point where the patent would have nearly expired anyways). Meanwhile, it's not really at all clear that the whole eraser-on-pencil really took off on its own. It sounds like, instead, some American companies liked the idea (perhaps to match parity with said investor, Joseph Reckendorfer) and started producing such pencils. Meanwhile, some 60+ years later and Europe still wasn't making such pencils (well, not commonly enough, anyways).
Oh, and the best part is the silly:
Or it could be that, oh, Europeans were still using their separate erasers and perhaps snarkily mocking the Americans for throwing away tons of perfectly good erasers just for the convenience of having one glued to the end of their pencil. Meanwhile, the more honest truth is probably the more simple that European pencil manufacturers probably didn't think there much demand and the vast majority of people weren't going to pay a premium to import the stupid things In the end, wide scale adoption would have more to do with there being only a few manufacturers which made up the effective industry in the area and with a majority all deciding something, whatever it was, was a good enough idea and offering the X + Y product as either a replacement for X or as a premium version of X, wide side adoption basically inherently happened. But even today, plenty of places sell pencils without erasers. And there's separate eraser heads you can pull off and reuse until they're heavily wore out (although those are still mighty wasteful as usually the base is pretty unusable for erasing.
So, now with that, I can happily say my comment is about as much a rambling little conjecture as the article.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Don't you just love rhetorical questions?
The pencil-eraser patent sounds pretty innovative to me, I don't see why it should have been struck down, but for one teensy little fact: American industry, up until about 1900, was 80% based on the wholesale ripping off of European technology. Weak patent protections were not only the norm, they were the basis for development.
Sometime around Henry Ford's time, that changed and America became a net exporter of technology. About the same time, it started expanding and strengthening protection of "intellectual property". That's not a coincidence.
The sooner you rid yourself of the idea that this has anything to do with "fairness" or "consistency", the sooner it will make sense. What drives changes in law is changes in the economy. Always.
The shift in policy is an intentional, if unwritten, strategy intended to keep America a competitive force in the world's economy.
In the past, America's power was based on its vast, untapped resources; steel, oil, cotton, grain, whatever - we had it and could rip it out of the ground cheaply. We sold these resources to the world and became rich. But these days other developing nations are willing to sell their resources far beyond what we can afford, and we can no longer depend on those resources as the primary engine of our economy.
Later, America's strength came from its industry; our factories produced high-quality goods in vast quantities. And we became rich again (well, even richer). But today, we've sold the technology to poorer nations, and their citizens are willing to work for wages that would starve our own people. So America can no longer depend on its industry to sustain it.
So instead, we've turned to our ingenuity and inventiveness as a way to ensure our dominance; our patents, our copyrights, our trademarks. We've hitched our wagon to the idea that our "intellectual property" will keep us a prominent force on the world stage. Of course, an idea is worthless unless somebody is willing to put it to use (the greatest movie in the world won't bring in a cent unless you get people to pay you to watch it). So we make all our ideas available to the world... for a price. And we have greatly bolstered our laws - and made clear our willingness to use force to defend those laws - to ensure that OUR ideas are not used without our receiving adequate recompense.
Except great ideas - the ones that bring in great wads of cash - are difficult to come by (Sturgeon's Law applies with ideas too) and while inspiration can be encouraged, it cannot be forced. So rather than depend on those rare strokes of genius, we ensure that even our less-stellar conceptions are protected the same way as the truly inspired ideas. Patents are increasingly granted on the most insignificant, inconsequential and mundane ideas because it brings in the money.
This is not to say there is some overreaching planned conspiracy; there was never a shadowy group of power-brokers chortling in some dark room as they moved the nation onto this new path. But America has always followed the path of money, and right now the big money is in intellectual property. Keeping its businesses strong makes strategic sense. Thus, we see an increased strengthening of certain laws (or weakening of others) to protect the interests of those businesses.
That's why there is little incentive to revamp the patent system, or bring copyright back down to sensible terms. It's why the American government is pushing so hard to enforce its copyright laws in other countries. It's why there is such a concern about copyright violations and why the Internet scares the people in power so much. American hegemony, they believe, is directly tied to how much intellectual property it owns, and how well it is protected.
In this modern day do patents promote innovation, or simply protect firms from competition ?
The issues regarding patents are not only about patents, but also the courts.
As the pencil and eraser case (circa 1858) has illustrated, the court back then still managed largely to uphold their independence.
Not now.
Today, the courts have become an apparatchik for the corporations, the banksters, the politicians, and the power that be.
Judges back then were chosen based on merits. Judges today are chosen based on who they know.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Some build up, through genius employed.
And lesser men must see work destroyed.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Wouldn't the story make Joseph Reckendorfer (the investor who bought the patent for $100,000 and then couldn't use it) a classical patent troll - only stopped by the Supreme Court? :-) Or would modern patent trolls be simply investors like Joseph?
Amazon's 1-click patent is a bad example of bad patents (for the reasons it is talked about, anyway.)
Programmers used to write editors and other software and not even bother asking you if you wanted to save before quitting. People realized this was stupid, and started putting up confirmation questions for every damned thing. It was so pervasive, computer science even introduced the concept of "appliance models", where when you changed options, the change was immediate, as if you were adjusting the volume on a radio, no "set" or "Are you really sure you want to change the value?" stuff.
As a programmer who lived through this time, it was absolutely inconceivable you would build a system to sell something and have it just sell-and-ship with no confirmation, no "Are you sure you want to actually buy this book, you're gonna be charged real money!"
There may be other reasons it's a bad patent (it's ridiculously simple to implement, and in a sense, is to buying "the appliance model", which the real world at the store is. The cashier doesn't ask you, "Are you sure you want to buy this stuff? Gonna charge your card!"
But 1-click sales via computer were decidedly not an obvious thing until after it was done .
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
... people will realize it's not about inventions, nor protecting investments (an absurd "de per se")... it's not even about firms or corporations. Everyone will see it's about countries and technology domination.
On that moment, things will scale from "Open Invention" to an international association of countries to form a huge pool of patents -- possibly affiliated with the UN.
On that day, maybe clever people from all parts of Earth might have a good chance at inventing things _and_ have peace of life.
Next thing we know you'll have issues with him putting a "rubber plug into the wood shaft".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The current national and international patent systems serve to protect companies from innovations both 'in, i.e. within the company' and 'out, i.e. outside threats from other companies innovations.'
The Internet has given access to knowledge to those who would know how to use it. Gone are the days that a person, or persons, with power and money, could simply say, "Nope, sorry, we don't care." Instead, they found another way to keep people from innovating against their innovations: a government inundated and swamped with patents that few of those granting them understand the little nobility of them, due to a false overwhelming of the understanding of the technology behind said patents.
In short: educate the government officers on technology, and you'll see all these "innovative" things go away.
But who's to say that people are going to stop innovating anyway? We are, afterall, "arrogant" Americans.
The cashier doesn't ask you, "Are you sure you want to buy this stuff? Gonna charge your card!"
Every time I go to Walmart, the cashier asks me to swipe my card. If I don't swipe, the transaction is canceled.
How appropriate is it that a guy named Hymen invented something with a phallic shape?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
If you think the current patent system is a good thing. Just post a reply to this message.
In 1990, the "everything runs better as a free market" doctrine wiped out government funding of the patent office, declaring that it would be fully funded by applicant fees from then on. (In fact, since that time Congress withholds some percentage of payments, so it's even more under-funded.) So the office doesn't work as a filter to defend a precious monopoly right, instead it's incentivized to make as many applicants happy as possible, since that's where all their money comes from. Result is a tidal wave of poorly examined patents that no one has time or resources to take court. (And yet: also an enormous and growing backlog of yet-unexamined patents). Pretty similar to how they've bent over the U.S. Post Office.
Step 1: Defund core government agency, Step 2: Complain about how government doesn't work, Step 3: Profit (for some private allied company).
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/?&sid=cp109OaGul&r_n=hr372.109&dbname=cp109&&sel=TOC_11043&
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
HYMEN LIPman put a rubber PLUG into the WOOD SHAFT of a PENCIL.
... to promote innovation by giving the patent-holder a legal monopoly for a limited period of time which effectively protects firms with patents from competition.
Wealth is not necessarily equivalent to cash, and many wealthy families do base their wealth not on cash, but on creation of product. It is unfortunate that so many wealthy people do not actually create anything, and therefore give wealth a bad name. Neither is debt a bad thing, if it is backed up by wealth. A lot of the debt problem is purely fictional. Look at Brazil. Cash is an invention of government, and the promotion of debt as a problem is used to purposely limit certain things for political gain. The US still has a lot of wealth and ability to create.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
...if he had invented a pencil eraser over the Internet
Society use your Sciences
Why would you want to blow air out of potato chips?
To make them denser?
I don't see why anyone would want one, but your invention to blow the air out of potato chips would certainly be novel and patentable.
Illusions created by media. Is the USA the home/king of much intellectual property? Does this give them the ability to create? The answer to both those questions was "Yes it _was_".
The real value of the USD is perpetuated through the strength of their military and is the only reason why other nations see it as a desirable currency. Since the US military kill and steal as common as brushing one's own teeth. In the eyes of the world it makes the USA a reliable place to lend and to hedge bets. Take away the warmongering and this factor becomes less apparent.
You've stated one very important truth.
Wealth is not necessarily equivalent to cash ... but on creation of product .... so many wealthy people do not actually create anything
Let me explain this in geek speak. If the US economy was a piece of software it's about to SEGFAULT and continually using malloc() will only get you out of trouble for so long.
If you patent a better mousetrap, nobody can make and sell that mousetrap design without paying you royalties. But they are still free to conceive of a better mousetrap and then patent their new and different design.
If you patent a "Computer Method," nobody can ever do that same "Computer Method" thing in any way shape, or form, such that it does the same thing. Computer patents cover the entire concept, such that nobody is free to come up with a different way of doing the same thing. The computer patent covers the entire act of trapping a mouse, not how you do it, or what methods you use to do it. The mere act of replicating the goal of the original design is illegal.
This is whats wrong with patent law.
Me: I got a patent for connecting a man and a woman together to create a new item!
Patent office: We are going to need evidence you actually put this idea into practice.
Me: Damn!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
In this modern day do patents promote innovation, or simply protect firms from competition?
There are a couple ways to read the first part of that question: 1) does the possibility of getting a patent inspire someone to innovate; and 2) does the presence of others' patents inspire someone to innovate? To (1), I think the answer is yes - think of the giant pharma companies that bank on getting a patent so they can recoup their years of massive R&D spend. To (2), I also think the answer is yes - plenty of companies are looking at patents and asking how they can avoid infringing them while doing nearly the same thing, possibly improving the thing in the process (we call this "designing around").
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
That's the US Constitutional basis for today's US patent system. I think a better question is whether the modern patent system is promoting sufficient progress, a question of degree.
What the pencil eraser case illustrates is that the underlying deal between the inventor, the government, and the public has changed. The basic terms are the same: as an incentive for innovating and making the fruits of innovation available to the public, the government rewards the inventor with a limited monopoly. But I think the scales on that deal have changed. The Supreme Court weighed the eraser patent's innovation in pounds, while today's system is inspecting something smaller than an ounce.
Today's inventor has to bring less to the table than inventors decades ago. And I mean that in two ways. First, what inventors disclose today is the bare minimum to get a patent. Maybe that was always the case and maybe it just feels different today because of the complexity and narrowness of the technology. But as a patent attorney, I'll tell you that it's very deliberate. And unfortunate. When British soldiers aimed a cannon at the Patent Office during the war of 1812, the Superintendent of Patents stood in front of the building and said:
Are you Englishmen or only Goths and Vandals? This is the Patent Office, a depository of the ingenuity of the American nation, in which the whole civilized world is interested. Would you destroy it? If so, fire away, and let the charge pass through my body.
The Patent Office was the only government building not burned in the fire because even the enemy understood the value of what was inside. Today, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone searching the files of the Patent Office in order to advance the state of the art. Keep an eye on competitors? Absolutely. Learn about a field of technology? Unlikely.
The second part of the deal that's changed, then, is what the government is willing to accept in exchange for a monopoly. On this point, it's hard to tell whether patented inventions today are less novel (or more obvious) or are simply smaller in scale. Consider what used to be patented: Edison's lightbulb and the Wright brothers' flight control system. We call these pioneer patents because they break open a whole new field of technology. Of course, improvements on existing technologies were allowed as patents too. Today, everyone here is probably familiar with the patents in dispute between Apple and Samsung. Far from pioneering, consider how minuscule those advancements were - how far the useful arts were progressed. Apple didn't have a patent on cell phones, smart phones, touch displays, or even on scrolling on smart phone touch displays - they received a patent on a very particular way of scrolling, among other things.
And that's the question: how much does an invention need to promote the progress of technology in order to be worthy of an exclusive right? Clearly, changing pencils forever was not sufficient previously. So is the technology to deliver intimately personalized ads
I have several patents. My son is an IP attorney. He and I are in agreement that the issue lies within the patent office, where most are forced to work outside of their core competencies (undergrad education) and have little incentive to investigate too much as it makes their docket stacks pile up.
Patents are currently granted with claims that fall all over existing patents, particularly those granted before 1970. Due to this, lawyers and civil actions are required to sort this out. Additionally, many judges are elected, and quite frequently firms regularly contribute to their campaigns, and then enter their courts as plaintiffs - slight conflict there, IMHO.
The truth of the matter is that in order to have a valid patent in America, you must have the resources to litigate. Otherwise larger entities will simply tie you up, drain your capital, and you let go of it to avoid starving or losing your home. I got that T-shirt - sometimes the only way to win is not to play, and go for that 'first-to-market' edge that comes from private investors. The big boys are slow to move, and this is often a better play.
As someone who will be filing for an optical patent shortly, there are a few ways to look at it.
I spent a year developing the concepts behind this patent in conjunction with an overseas corporation. I was not paid for the time, plus the director of the company worked directly with me in his time off work, was not paid for this either.
Under an agreement we hope to use this patent to enjoy significant market advantage over their competition, who have copied this businesses patents in the past, effectively taking business, making the type of product seem lower cost, inferior, because of workmanship, legal battle ensued etc..
My question - why shouldn't we enjoy a technological advantage? We designed the solution. We came up with it first. We spent the time to push the boundaries beyond what everyone else is doing in the industry. How else can we protect that?
Why should someone be able to copy our work, covering none of our time or costs, to make money off it?
Then there is no reason to develop anything new - everyone will just steal it.
I wonder if he comes from here? And maybe this vacancy from /.'s front page will be of interest.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
In the case of the pencil and the eraser, I think anyone can consider it was an obvious thing to do.
But what about all this complex wizardry in the computer world? What patent examiner really understands what is going on to say with sufficient confidence that such and such isn't innovative or otherwise worthy of a patent? That's why patent applications designed merely to confuse patent examiners get granted with such regularity.
It's like having a regular joe sit in on a surgery and critique the doctors performing it. What can he really say other than "seemed good to me" when the surgery is complete? We need patent examiners who understand this stuff and can come to educated decisions.
Wow, having Hymen, Lipman and rubber all in the same sentence is just totally looking for trouble.
When the market export from the USA was up, they accepted international copyrights because before then, they only accepted copyrights within the USA from USA writers and publishing companies.
When they wanted to sell abroad, they then wanted international copyrights to be agreed by EVERYONE.
Patents today are only used by companies to set back their competition, and anyone who gets relatively close to copying one of these "inventions" gets sued - so the company makes even more money!
"put a rubber plug into the wood shaft of a pencil"
For some reason, I felt the writer worked on a pr0n set at one time.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
I don't get why people think that there wasn't something new here. It's a terrible patenting example because of that.
I'm going to reply to you again, because I think I've figured out the flaw in your reasoning, and why nobody is seeing eye to eye here:
You seem to think you can patent an idea. You can't. It says so right in the uspto website.
So if you want to figure out if the patent is valid, and not obvious, you take the idea over to an expert in manufacturing. Ask him, "I want to attach an eraser to a pencil. Do you know how to go about doing that?" If he can come up with different ways on the spot, it's obvious.
On the other hand, I want rocket boots. I can go to a rocket scientist and ask him, "I want to attach rockets to boots. Do you know how to go about doing that?" He's going to tell me, "yeah, there's a ton of problems with this. We need to figure out where to put the fuel, rockets have a way of exploding, which make them not very safe, they're not particularly stable, and when you combine that with legs that can move all around you've got serious problems, etc." There are serious technical challenges to all of that. Solve any one of those challenges that experts in the field current have, and you can get a patent on it. The idea of putting rockets in boots still isn't. Your particular solution that makes it possible, or brings it closer to reality, that's patentable, if it's new and non-obvious to experts in the field.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Innovation was here long before patents, and it will still be here long after patents. During, there could be some trouble.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
So if I can put together a set of old things, and demonstrate they do something like the 1 click patent, does that invalidate the patent? I.e. call the company operator and say "whenever I dial 18005551212+5, you connect me to Godiva at 18005551212+3456, which automatically orders another box of chocolates to the Macy's account". Then hook up a lever in my office to dial that number, with a label "Godiva chocolates". I guess that would be 1 pull ordering and not 1 click ordering?
Lawyers today make sure that a patent is minimum 50 pages, and some run to more than 1000. The language is extremely formalized and very hard to read for untrained minds. And the issues are so specialized that the average judge would have to train several years in the particular field to understand what the invention is about.
There is an easy solution then. If the patent cannot be explained to a judge in terms they can understand then it should be denied. If the patent cannot be explained in 3 pages or less then it probably is an attempt to obfuscate the issue.
You seem to think you can patent an idea. You can't. It says so right in the uspto website.
Except that you can patent an idea in practice. Software patents are effectively patenting an idea. Software = Math. Math should be unpatentable as it is by definition abstract but you certainly can get a patent on software. Patent on software = patent on math = patent on idea. There is (so far) no requirement to provide working code and plenty of software patents have been approved for the last several decades without providing so much as a functional algorithm.
I could have worded that better. I meant to make an electric fan OUT OF (mostly) potato chips.
It wouldn't be anything new. It's still a fan. It's still potato chips (and presumably some wire, etc.).
But if you could make it so it was still edible, you'd have something new. Nobody today makes edible electric fans.
It wasn't a very good example. It was late.
The system could be fixed trivially, if people cared to do so. For example, add a provision to the law which allows an affirmative defense of independent discovery; after all, an innovation worthy of a patent is supposed to be innovative enough that other people cannot just stumble upon it through normal evolutionary work. That would put the onus on the patent holder to prove that the patent information was accessed by the accused-infringer during development, which would make it substantially harder for patent trolls to exist (that is, it's much easier to assert that you didn't see the patented item in the Patent Office publications, than in a competitor's widely distributed implementation).
The fact that it's not fixed points to malfeasance on the part of Congress, as much as private individuals taking advantage of the system.
If the working of the invention become obvious at the point the invention hits the market, society has no reason to offer the inventor patent protection in exchange for being let in on the secret. Only in cases where the trick wouldn't be obvious to a practitioner skilled in the applicable arts do we have any reason to say "Oh, come on, just tell us how it works and we promise not to compete with you!" -- in other words, grant a patent in exchange for full disclosure.
Patents are supposed to be what we grant the inventor in exchange for their revealing a "trade secret" that we wouldn't have otherwise been able to figure out.
-- MarkusQ
That would make sense if there was a shred of evidence that people only invent things because they hope to patent them. Say maybe if the world were full of saying like "IP protection is the mother of invention" or "invent a better mouse trap and the world will grant you exclusive use of the idea for a limited time."
Or suppose we had clear evidence that primitive people lived lives little different than those of other animals until some freak accident created the first intellectual property laws, triggering the taming of fire, agriculture, and so forth.
Of course, we don't see any of that. We don't live in that world and it takes a rather twisted view of human nature to swallow the notion that patents somehow cause invention.
On the other hand, all it takes to support the notion that patents were intended to cause disclosure of inventions is a little reading. For example, in the second paragraph of The Patent Act of 1790 we find the prerequisites for obtaining a patent and the reason for them spelt out. In the second full sentence of US patent law we are told that those seeking patents must:
If you want a patent on your gizmo, you have to fully disclose the details so anyone reasonably competent can make and use one after the patent expires.
That is what society gets out of it. The promotion of progress isn't about gulling people into inventing stuff (they were doing that already). It's about making sure that other people can copy those inventions, build on them, progress from them, rather than having the secret die with the inventor thus forcing everyone else to (as the saying goes) "reinvent the wheel".
--MarkusQ
I think I'll patent a rubber plug on the end of my mouse and invent the mouse erasure. Pressing it is the same as Ctrl-Z.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
Certain patent classes should be eliminated, such as the use patents on genetically modified food.