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Inventor Has Waited 43 Years For Patent Approval
An anonymous reader writes "If you think the average wait of 28.3 months for a patent to be approved is ridiculous, don't complain to Gilbert P. Hyatt. The 76-year-old inventor has been waiting over forty years for a ruling on whether his electronic signal to control machinery should be granted a patent. 'It's totally unconscionable,' said Brad Wright, a patent lawyer with Banner & Witcoff in Washington who specializes in computer-related applications and isn't involved in Hyatt's case. 'The patent office doesn't want to be embarrassed that they might issue a broad patent that would have a sweeping impact on the technology sector. Rather than be embarrassed, they're just bottling it up.'"
Haven't carried out a detail search on the said patent,
You won't be able to, either. The article states that due to age of the patent, the application is confidential.
Without seeing the application, it's difficult to tell what its validity is. But when this patent application was filed in 1971, electronic control of machinery was already quite widespread. So, it would have to be quite specific about its implementation. Then there is the question of making companies pay for something they knew nothing about.
In the end, congress would have the power to invalidate this patent outright, if they wanted to.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
What value has this man added to a single piece of equipment sold in the last 40 years? What part of these machines relied on his effort or ingenuity? If his patent had never been filed, are we to seriously believe that progress would have been held back by so much as an hour.
Let drop this passive-aggressive geek myth of the vital "small-guy" inventor and the civilization changing ideas which supposedly emerge from his superior brain. It is far, far easier, and far, far better for society as a whole to simply regard all patent holders as parasites, and simply stop issuing them. Inventors can start their own companies or get a job like everyone else.
Reward belongs to those who add value. To those who produce things; produce wealth. it does not belong to the people who "thought" of doing so, or who had some "bright idea" sometimes in the 1970s. It belongs to the three generations of people since who put their -- unpatented -- ideas into action and made them a reality. To the people who competed based on the merits of their results, and not the entitlement they felt their intellects deserved.
It's time to put patents away. All patents. Our society will make better progress without them. Inventors are not worth the price being paid to parasites.
May the Maths Be with you!
Hyatt refers to it as his square wave machine control patent.
But that's about all that is known.
I'd speculate It would flow out of his digital processors patents, and probably has something to do with controlling motors with a microprocessor via pulse width modulation or some such other common technique.
His problem is that the world plus dog independently discovered a variety of means to do the same thing in the interval since his first filing, if for no other reason than once you have a microprocessor (which he also invented), it is the obvious and natural way to control external devices.
Still, patents should be granted or denied. No reasonable excuse to sit on this forever. No way should the PTO get a "pocket veto" authority.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The guy submits wildy broad patents and wants to use them to sell to patent trolls. Fuck cutting him some slack, just reject the damn patents already.
He did not invent the microprocessor.
He filed a fanciful patent application describing the possibility, waited until someone else figured out how to make it reality, then sued them.
He might be the patent troll patient zero.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
This guy invented the microprocessor
Under dispute. Actually, he eventually lost his patent, but not until after he managed to extract millions in licensing fees from it. An anti-Hyatt page.
successfully sued the state of California for nearly $400 million because they tried to extort taxes he didn't owe out of him
Whether he owes them or not is still not settled. He won money from California on the basis of a Nevada jury for California's auditory process. The bottom line is that he moved to Las Vegas to avoid California taxes from his license windfall.
So far, everything he's done relating to tech has been righteous imo, let's cut him some slack.
From the article: "While some of Hyatt's patents predate or are contemporary with those granted to executives at Intel and Texas Instruments Inc., those companies made products that changed the world, Bassett said.
"I respect Gilbert Hyatt's work -- the process of engineering is difficult," Bassett said in a telephone interview. "But innovations are more than ideas. The broader context matters. If Gilbert Hyatt had never existed, I believe the microprocessor would have developed in the same way that it did.""
Horse shit. The microprocessor was the work of people like Bill Shockley, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Jay Last, etc. This guy patented some overly broad concept and tried to use those rights to patent troll.
Yeah, you're right. I think they prefer to be called "single-input NAND gates" these days. Political correctness gone mad, I tell ya...
Article seems to be talking about patent application 05/302771, and the status of the case is miles away from the way it's described in the article. This patent has been through several levels of non-final and final rejections, appeals, and court actions. Through the USPTO's public PAIR (Patent Application Information Retrieval) system, you can access hundreds of pages of information and history on the case, including what are now several hundred pending claims. Even if the application itself hasn't been published, the file history is ripe with lots of information. You can see the patent examiners' rejections and there's a 494-page appeal brief filed on behalf of the Applicant, from which you can see many of the pending claims. The patent office rejections appear mainly under section 112 on the basis that the claims aren't adequately supported by the patent disclosure. It's not as if he just applied for the patent and waited 43 years - he's been trying hard not to take NO for the answer.
In addition, there appear to be about 150 additional patent cases filed as continuations on dates between 1977 and 1995 - some still pending and some abandoned. Most of them aren't accessible under the public PAIR system because of the pre-1995 filing dates. Presumably there's no continuations filed after 1995 because under the post-1995 rules, the application would expire 20 years from the earliest filing date, so they'd expire before granting. If many of these continuations have hundreds of claims like the parent case, there could be tens of thousands of claims that he's trying to get granted.