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Japanese Nobel Laureate Blasts His Country's Treatment of Inventors
schwit1 writes: Shuji Nakamura won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics (along with two other scientists) for his work inventing blue LEDs. But long ago he abandoned Japan for the U.S. because his country's culture and patent law did not favor him as an inventor. Nakamura has now blasted Japan for considering further legislation that would do more harm to inventors.
"In the early 2000s, Nakamura had a falling out with his employer and, it seemed, all of Japan. Relying on a clause in Japan's patent law, article 35, that assigns patents to individual inventors, he took the unprecedented step of suing his former employer for a share of the profits his invention was generating. He eventually agreed to a court-mediated $8 million settlement, moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and became an American citizen. During this period he bitterly complained about Japan's treatment of inventors, the country's educational system and its legal procedures. 'The problem is now the Japanese government wants to eliminate patent law article 35 and give all patent rights to the company. If the Japanese government changes the patent law it means basically there would no compensation [for inventors].'"
There is a similar problem with copyright law in the U.S., where changes to the law in the 1970s and 1990s have made it almost impossible for copyrights to ever expire. The changes favor the corporations rather than the individuals who might actually create the work.
"In the early 2000s, Nakamura had a falling out with his employer and, it seemed, all of Japan. Relying on a clause in Japan's patent law, article 35, that assigns patents to individual inventors, he took the unprecedented step of suing his former employer for a share of the profits his invention was generating. He eventually agreed to a court-mediated $8 million settlement, moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and became an American citizen. During this period he bitterly complained about Japan's treatment of inventors, the country's educational system and its legal procedures. 'The problem is now the Japanese government wants to eliminate patent law article 35 and give all patent rights to the company. If the Japanese government changes the patent law it means basically there would no compensation [for inventors].'"
There is a similar problem with copyright law in the U.S., where changes to the law in the 1970s and 1990s have made it almost impossible for copyrights to ever expire. The changes favor the corporations rather than the individuals who might actually create the work.
Only if he knew that all work created during the time of employment in the US rightfully belongs to the employer....
In the US, your employee contract will state that everything you invent is property of the company. The patent will be listed in your name, but patent ownership will be assigned to the company.
There is a similar problem with copyright law in the U.S., where changes to the law in the 1970s and 1990s have made it almost impossible for copyrights to ever expire. The changes favor the corporations rather than the individuals who might actually create the work.
Wow it's amazing how if you hate something enough you can see everything as justifying your hatred.
Having copyright extend ever longer is both stupid and counterproductive, but it's no way comparable to changes that take away a creators right to profit from their creations. Arguably it makes the creations more valuable and makes it easier to invest in creating material for either a corporation or an individual. Contrast that with a law from the article that "If the Japanese government changes the patent law it means basically there would no compensation [for inventors]." Apples to Orangutans here.
With so many very good arguments about why copyright needs to be reformed there's no need to make bad ones.
Patent and copyright laws have never been about compensating inventors or creators. If they had been, they would be mandating actual payment to them.
Their construction as monopoly rights in a market where few individual creators or inventors will be scarce resources ensures that the negotiating power will be entirely on those in control of markets and distribution networks. The middle man can easily just pick up another provider of materials, while the originator is forced to take whatever deal is offered or face being unable to reach customers at all. Modern technology has slightly improved the situation with better opportunities, but ultimately, the deck is stacked solidly against the creators.
But that's working as it's designed. The purpose of monopoly rights has always been to provide stable market power and protection from free market competition for the friends of the crown. Creators are merely the convenient, powerless and easily replaceable excuse.
Spend your personal time and resources at inveting.
If you spend your worktime and resources from your job for your invention I don't see why you personally should get a patent. If my boss pays me to clean toilets and I invent something then there might be a point, but if my boss pays me (and gives me staff to freely use) to invent stuff I don't see the merit.
He created the work while employed by someone. That someone provided him with all the equipment and capabilities to do the research why the hell should he be awarded the patent?
If you are part of a team who gets the patent? It seems to me only logical that the entity that commissioned the work, invested the resources and made it happen ie the company should own the patent.
As for the education system. Correct me if I am wrong but this guy who is now holder of a nobel prize is the product of that education system.... There seems to be a serious axe to grind there with a feeling that he didn't get his due and I think he is drawing a very long bow.
It seems to me that Japan is no worse than any other place from a patent perspective, though I cannot speak to corporate culture and patenting.
At most companies in the US involved in any kind of R&D, one must sign a document assigning any inventions that you make within the company's operating sphere to the company. The assignment means that although you are recognized as inventor, you do not get any ownership of the intellectual property. This is often a condition of employment. After all, it's rather hard to prove that you had the creative insight for an invention at home watcing TV as opposed to on "company time". Some companies take the further stance that anything you invent AT ALL during your employment period is their property. Personally, I disagree with that, but they can still make it a condition of employment. You can get the patent reassigned to you if your employer has not interest in pursuing it.
In the US, the organization is not required to give you a bonus or a cut of the licensing fees. Some companies would give the inventor a symbolic $1 per patent. Some companies would give the inventor(s) a bonus to encourage innovation. Some don't.
For patents filed from a university, the policies vary greatly. Some of the money will often go to the professor whose lab made the discovery, and that professor has a lot of discretion as to the use for the money. Some professors may allocate some money to the students or workers involved in the discovery. Others might use the money to fund further research in the laboratory. Some might keep the money for themselves.
It does seem like Japan's article 35 creates a nice incentive for inventors. It would be a shame for Japanese innovators to lose this incentive. But how is the US any better? Is Europe any better?
This is just idiotic. In America if you're work for hire the company owns your patents unless you invent them on your own time using your own resources. He's a damned fool, in America he wouldn't have gotten a cent if he'd tried to sue his employer for royalties unless his contract expressly granted royalties.
The dude didn't happen to work for Serano Genomics, perchance?
#DeleteChrome
Clearly this means that the patent money is not a great catalyst for the invention he made.
How do you come to this conclusion? It is more likely that he worked on research in the hopes that he will share the profits that it generates. Think of it as stock based compensation. You would work before you see the money, if you do good, you will see money when the stock price increases.
I'm a bit confused. US law assigns no rights at all to inventors. How exactly is going abroad going to benefit Japanese inventors? Which countries are they supposed to go to?
In the US, you have some power to negotiate with your employer, or to choose among employers based on their patent assignment/reward policy. If you think your work is going to be very lucrative, you can ask for a share of the commercialization value.
Article 35 more or less does what a lot of people here are asking for: it requires companies to compensate the people actually responsible for an invention. The problem is that one has no idea whether an invention will actually be commercially successful or not, so Article 35 resulted in a standardized practice of paying inventors a fixed bonus (~$10,000) for an invention, regardless of whether that invention was worth $1,000 or $100,000,000.
I'm afraid you need to look up his case. His employers said "stop" and ended the funding, especially of technician time and equipment. He then completed the work on his own time, out of his own salary, with equipment and materials he bought. The company did wind up owning the patent. But this is a case where the inventor did, indeed, act as a dedicated scientist and engineer, not merely as an employee under managerial direction.
You don't get to renegotiate afterwards. Your incentive to do stuff at work is your salary.
Why not? If you have the bargaining position to negotiate a better deal after the fact why shouldn't you? Some naive sense of obligation or fairness to a company that doesn't reciprocate? Don't be absurd. Some work cannot be done without having the resources of a company behind you and no one ever knows if they are going to create something really valuable ahead of time. Maybe the guy was in a tough situation when he was first employed and wasn't in a position to walk away despite some odious contractual terms. If the guy has the ability to get paid for the full value of his work then he should seek to do so.
I run a company and if someone were to unexpectedly create something that benefited the company greatly, I'd be a selfish prick to not share substantially of the rewards with that person. It doesn't mean the company has to hand over all the benefits but sharing a substantial percent of the rewards with an inventor is quite fair.
If you are writing code for a living you will create new things ever day to solve the problem you encounter.
That doesn't mean every problem you solve will be worth millions to the company. This guy did something FAR beyond the expected value of his services and it's not unreasonable for him to ask to be compensated accordingly even after the fact. While the company doesn't legally have to do anything, it doesn't follow that they shouldn't make sure the guy is well compensated for his efforts.
Good for us. Less motivation in Japan, more smart Japanese coming to the USA
Inventions are rare. Corporations invest in an uncountable number of inventions that go absolutely nowhere.
That's not a logical argument against post-hoc compensating the talented folks who do create the inventions that actually do turn out to be worth millions. If you have a star player, you pay that player according to their contributions. To do otherwise is both unfair and disrespectful. There is no reason this company could not provide this guy a very substantial bonus as thanks for his contributions if the invention really was worth millions.
Put it this way. Would you work hard for an employer who you knew was going to keep all the upside of your work or would you rather work hard for an employer with a track record of rewarding success proportionate to the success?
In those situations you dont hear "Well Mr Employee, the work we have been working on has turned out to be a massive dead end. As a result we need you to sell your house to put towards the costs.
The company is not taking the same amount of risk. If the company and the officers of the company were taking an equal amount of risk to their personal fortunes then fine. But the company is simply making investments like I buy stocks for my portfolio. Some work out, some don't but those that don't aren't going to put me into poverty. It's not even remotely the same level of risk as someone who has hocked their house.
That if you are getting a salary while doing this research, then unless you signed a clause in your contract upon being hired, should be going to the corporation.
You basically whored out your "inventivness" to them.....If the company can't sue you to to recoup the money it spent paying you if you develop nothing of value, you should basically not expect a % of something of value.
Like everything else in life, the more risk you take, the better the reward if you succeed.
This guy gets it. He was told to STOP WORKING on the blue LED, did it anyway, preformed successfully, and the company STOLE the patent. Later, he exercised his right to leave, out of disgust. As the sum total of this, Japan lost the blue LED patent (rights were taken over to the USA) and a brilliant scientific mind.
His warning is direct: If you implement further policies such as this, then you, Japan, will lose your innovators, and corporate profits will follow.
Honeywell once tried to make that claim, thinking that they were in Minneapolis. Alas, it's prohibited in Canada, where we were doing business (;-))
davecb@spamcop.net
But his employer bought the equipment he used, paid him for his time, and organised the research. And I am pretty sure that he did not work alone. What about all the other researchers?
Researchers should be compensated and motivated by their salary, not by the chance on a patent.
Patent and copyright laws have never been about compensating inventors or creators. If they had been, they would be mandating actual payment to them.
Patents and copyrights are mechanisms that create the OPPORTUNITY for inventors or creators to profit from their work. If the inventors sell their work or assign it as a condition of employment to a third party, that is a separate issue. If they cannot or will not profit from their work, that is their problem. The idea is to give them a "temporary" (yeah, I know...) monopoly on their work as a reward for creating something valuable to society. The entire purpose is to combat the free rider problem. Find a better solution to the free rider problem and there is no need whatsoever for patents or copyrights.
Your incentive to invent while being employed is staying employed. Companies fund R&D so that they can profit from the discoveries.
That doesn't mean the company cannot share a portion of the profits from those discoveries with the people who made them possible. It is hardly unreasonable to throw a big fat bonus at someone who creates a technology that generates millions in profits for the company. It's no different than paying a big commission check to a sales person who lands a big account. It rewards success and helps motivate other employees by showing them than they will benefit directly by creating something valuable. Would you bother to create something worth millions if you weren't going to see any of the upside but someone else would? If you do I think you are either naive or a fool.
Honestly engineers *should* take a lesson from sales and demand upside participation if their work generates profits for the company. Creating the product is every bit as important as selling it. I think a company could get very interesting results by providing upside participation to engineering staff.
And herein lies the great virtue and vice of capitalism: the assignment of profits to the owner of capital, rather than the one who made the capital useful.
Close but I don't think that is quite correct. Capitalism rewards control of resources necessary to utilize capital, of which capital ownership itself is merely one. Things like client relationships, product development, labor availability, and the like all can make or break whether capital can be employed productively to generate profits.
Sales people tend to be well compensated because they generate capital and they have historically structured their compensation (via commissions) to participate in the upside if they are successful in bringing in clients. They control a vital resource (the client relationship) and they know it. There is no fundamental reason why engineers could not in principle do the same if they were willing to take similar risks. I know employers would would jump at an engineer willing to work on commission. But that does involve taking a risk and I know very few engineers who are willing to take such risks. Sales people control a vital resource (the client relationship) and engineers could do the same (product development) if they cared to do so and were willing to take some risks.
Furthermore groups like unions are able to demand a portion of the profits by controlling the availability of labor. If there is no labor available to do the work, it doesn't matter who owns the capital because a vital resource to utilize that capital has been removed. And there is nothing inherently wrong with employees unionizing to demand a reasonable amount of upside participation if their work proves valuable. (The problem with unions is that they tend to value certainty of employment and wages regardless of competence over all other concerns which can incur costs with no upside benefit to the company. If a union prioritized upside participation and was willing to share in the investment risk they probably would see a lot more interest in unionizing.)
But his employer bought the equipment he used, paid him for his time, and organised the research. And I am pretty sure that he did not work alone. What about all the other researchers?
Researchers should be compensated and motivated by their salary, not by the chance on a patent.
CEOs should be compensated and motivated by their salary, not by the chance on a stock option. Taxed on it too.
It is much more than an evolutionary change, really, it is like jumping 1m high vs jumping 3m high.
And your argument is flawed : if everyone think "someone else will do it" then no one will do it.
And probably gave him a small year end bonus, whereas the upper executives are getting millions each in compensation from the same invention. Even if an executive is doing an awful job and gets fired they still keep the gold. What is the problem with *sharing* the benefit? No one is asking that the individual inventor receive all the benefits and the company gets none, yet this law is going the other way so that the inventor will get no tangible benefits other than an attaboy.
It is not necessarily the monetary part that is the motivation for researchers. However not getting the money is absolutely a negative motivation when it becomes clear that your company is not treating you fairly.
Whole teams had been working on it for 3-4 decades with no real advances. The materials he used to make his LEDs work had been considered decades back but no one could get them to work and all research on it had basically stopped. He got it to work because he did all the research by himself and produced the materials himself as well so he could see the complete picture. The research teams in the US were so specialized they couldn't solve it.
This guy basically invented the first high power dark green LED, the blue LED, and his team invented the violet LED partly under his watch as well. After he left both his team and himself continued working on white LEDs.
Do you think he would have got the Nobel Prize if it was just a small step over the state of the art? The work he did enabled a lot of applications which simply could not have been done before from LED lighting, to Bluray, etc.
Sure, it is customary to give a modest bonus/etc to those who succeed, but if all 100 engineers worked equally hard but most were just unlucky to be on the project that didn't work out, does it make sense to compensate the 10 on the successful project so much more? They all did what the
You are presuming that the engineers have no control over the success or failure of the project or that they have no role in determining the course of the project. You need to think of the engineer as more of an independent contractor rather than a salaried employee. It's the responsibility of the engineer to figure out whether they think they can create a valuable product or whether they are wasting their time. Fail fast if necessary. Find another company if this one is a dead end. A salesman can't sell ice to Eskimos in the real world. Engineers usually have a pretty good idea (or should) whether a product they are working on is useful or not. If they don't then they probably aren't a very good engineer.
You are also presuming effort is an important factor here. Capitalism rewards success, not effort. If the engineers work hard but don't solve a problem that matters then no, they will not see any rewards for their efforts. You want big rewards? You're going to have to take a risk and solve a problem that really matters. How hard you work is pretty much irrelevant unless it brings financial results. Maybe hard work will make the difference but FAR more important is talent applied appropriately and in a timely manner.
If you really want to get rewarded for your work, then go work for a startup. You'll get paid next to nothing, and most likely you'll go out of business receiving nothing for your work. However, if you do succeed you will own a substantial portion of the company and thus get a substantial portion of the reward.
Or work in sales or finance where you get payment commensurate with the financial results you are responsible for. Working for a startup is one way to financial success but hardly the only one. Engineers tend to be very bright except when it comes to selling their services. Many could earn far more than they do but are afraid to try.
Bottom line is that I think there needs to be a balance between risk and reward.
There already is a balance. If you don't take any risks, don't expect any rewards. If you want the steady salary and the sure-thing job, that's fine but don't expect anyone to pay you millions for it either. If you want the big payday you'll probably have to forgo the steady low-paying sure-thing and work on commission or for equity. Sales people take a risk when they work on commission. Why should engineers enjoy greater job security for the same rewards?
The main purpose of a CEO is to increase the value of the company. Therefore, stock options are a better incentive than salaries.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
And employees are not expected to add value to the company? Well then, why do we hire them?
Yeah just like musicians should just be content with a small salary and let the people who make the CD's & sell the mp3's make the money. And just like footballers should be content with small salaries while their teams still rake in the millions or billions.
You want to look at the UK tech industry. Before WWII the UK was actually the most advanced tech nation on Earth, even by the 1980's still number two or three now well it isn't there any more. Why? hell of a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones was that inventors working for companies were poorly paid, frequently ripped off, and rarely made a benefit from their inventions. All great demotivators.
If an inventor makes millions or billions for a company he (or she) should at least get some reward for that..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..