Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
No, the reason why this isn't being fixed is that a significant number of voters vote for politicians that run on a platform that includes deregulation and freeing the market of even modest restraints on bad behavior. And are quite vocal in shouting down anybody that suggests even modest reforms as being elitists and pushing for a totalitarian, nanny state.
The main problem with democracy is that it depends upon the voters actually being interested in voting for people that represent their best interests. As long as one party routinely votes against the self interests of their own voters, and hamstrings the other party, you get this sort of a mess.
The US is hardly unique in having problems that need fixing but can't be fixed because the politicians aren't interested in it. Most countries are like that. Assuming you even get to vote there.
"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
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
politicians that run on a platform that includes deregulation and freeing the market of even modest restraints on bad behavior.
A condition of deregulation would be one without patents. Certainly not one promoted by corporate interests. For each issue, its always a matter of following the money to see whether the decision will be pro or anti regulation.
As long as one party routinely votes against the self interests of their own voters,
The party works for its financial supporters. Voters are a minor inconvenience in that they have to be manipulated to keep the party in power. In Soviet Russia, they used the term 'useful idiots' for such supporters of the cause.
Have gnu, will travel.
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
As a programmer who lived through that era, it was an obvious thing to do. The only question is whether you'd want to do it, and that is what you address. You fully admit that you could have done it if you wanted to.
You can't patent something because you're the first person who wants to do it. It has to be non-obvious. At least in theory.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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.
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