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80-Year-Old Inventor Gil Hyatt Says Patent Office is Waiting For Him To Die (venturebeat.com)
Dean Takahashi, reporting for VentureBeat: Gil Hyatt has gotten many rewards from his days as an inventor. In 1990, he received a fundamental but controversial patent on what he called the first microprocessor, or computer on a chip. It was 22 years late, but he nosed out rivals such as Intel in being the first to file for a patent application in 1968. He then licensed that patent and 22 of his 69 other patents to Philips Electronics, which then began enforcing them on the rest of the electronics industry and collecting royalties.
Philips' efforts netted Hyatt more than $150 million, though the state of California would try for 24 years to take a big chunk of that money for taxes. It argued that Hyatt pretended to move to Las Vegas in 1991, but in 2017, he finally prevailed in convincing the tax board that he really did move. But at 80 years old, Hyatt still isn't resting on the rewards he got. In fact, he's still in a bitter battle with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He claims the office is sitting on his remaining applications, and is waiting for him to die. Hyatt sued to get the patent office to issue his remaining patent applications. The patent office declined to comment, citing the litigation. Further reading: Gil Hyatt interview: Why patent examiners gave controversial patents a scarlet letter.
Philips' efforts netted Hyatt more than $150 million, though the state of California would try for 24 years to take a big chunk of that money for taxes. It argued that Hyatt pretended to move to Las Vegas in 1991, but in 2017, he finally prevailed in convincing the tax board that he really did move. But at 80 years old, Hyatt still isn't resting on the rewards he got. In fact, he's still in a bitter battle with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He claims the office is sitting on his remaining applications, and is waiting for him to die. Hyatt sued to get the patent office to issue his remaining patent applications. The patent office declined to comment, citing the litigation. Further reading: Gil Hyatt interview: Why patent examiners gave controversial patents a scarlet letter.
Why are they calling him an inventor? Just because he got patents that automatically means he is one? It's clear he scammed a broken system (well, it works as it's designed actually, but broken for humanity as a whole in the sense that we all get fucked by it)
It should be use em or lose em.
In 1990, he received a fundamental but controversial patent on what he called the first microprocessor, or computer on a chip. It was 22 years late
First "on a computer" patent troll.
So the first MCU that used an instruction set, but made from individual transistors, was made in 1953. Vacuum tubes that worked as transistors were older yet.
The first integrated circuit that was designed to act as a transistor was built in 1956 and the design for it was a couple years before that.
Gil Hyatt filed in 1968, over a decade before each and every component of his invention was already invented and put together using the same IC structure his patent described.
The reason Fairchild and Intel fought so hard was in essence because *at best* Gil Hyatt invented the second MCU instruction set to ever exist, but fairchilds was the third and Intel was the forth.
If Gil deserves a patent on an existing design that only differs in the instruction set, then neither fairchild or intels also-different instruction set should be covered by the same patent.
If Gil's covers all future instruction sets to ever be invented, then being the second inventor he should lose his patent to Geoffrey Dummer instead.
This guy is a patent troll who's only real "first" was to file the original "an existing thing, on my computer" patent.
What's worse... calling a patent troll, however successful he was, an "inventor"... or that California spent two and half decades trying to extort that patent troll for money.
California Franchise Tax Board (California's version of the IRS) is like that.. My wife and I bought a house in Las Vegas in 1994, and she moved into the house then and went to work for a local hospital. I got a tiny studio apartment near work in San Diego, as I had a job I liked and there was a rumor going around that there were going to be layoffs in the near future and I'd hoped to get laid off vs quiting. The wait for the layoffs wound up being close to 2 years, so I did quite a bit of flying up to Las Vegas over the weekend for that time. The layoffs finally happened in Dec 1995, and I was laid off. I moved my stuff up to Las Vegas and got unemployment. During the nearly two years I was still working in San Diego, I filed state income tax returns showing my California wages but did NOT show wife's Nevada wages. To make a long story short, I had to pay a tax attorney quite a bit AND nearly two years to convince the FTB that Nevada wages were NOT taxable by California, even though I had California wages. The CalFTB can FUCK OFF.. Soooo damn glad we escaped that nuthouse...
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He claims the office is sitting on his remaining applications, and is waiting for him to die.
Me too; and I'm only 50!
this is just a rich guy evading taxes. The "Snowbirds" in Arizona & Florida who live there 6.5 months out of the year do the same damn thing.
As someone who lives in one state and pays every dime of taxes owed with zero deductions (stopped getting those when my kid turned 17.5) screw this noise. Enjoy civilization? Pay your dues like everyone else.
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Tired of companies inventing something great, then they stop innovating and instead sink all their money into lawyers and sue sue sue. Die Die Die.
Actually, it's when they're dying that they sue, sue, sue.
When a tech company is doing well, their money is better spent innovating and staying ahead of the pack. When they're getting behind, it's still better spent on getting ahead.
During this period patent portflios are mostly used defensively against other company's suits. Find some patents in the portfolio the other guys can be accused of infringing and counter-sue. Then settle for a cross-licensing agreement, and maybe a true-up payment if one side has a bigger pile of relevant patents.
But when they're dying, they're desperate. That's when they go through their portfolio and sue anybody they might be able to make money from.
(Been there, dealt with that: Northern Telecom was on the ropes. They'd been a big player in the design of SONNET and had a lot of patents on it. So they went after anybody with patents that looked like they were doing something SONNET-related that might infringe on one of theirs. So I and my co-architect got to spend a few weeks writing, for our lawyers, a set of analyses of why each of several NT patents didn't cover the stuff in our patents, or other chunks of the chips we'd designed that looked like they just MUST have an infringing component. B-b )
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