9 ms·

Super Soaker creator awarded $72.9M from Hasbro

183 points by shill 13y ago

siculars 13y ago
Who do these corporate conglomerates think they are by trying to con inventors from their due? This happens all too often. These corporations love to lord their patents over everyone else but refuse to pay up when it is clear they not only have a legal obligation, but a moral one as well. Note, Robert Kearns, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns.
reneherse 13y ago
Ha, awesome to know that the Super Soaker came from such a brilliant inventor and businessman! Lots of good memories with those things... As a kid I hacked my own extra powerful version using a bicycle frame pump, soda bottles, pvc pipe, copper tubing and brass valves, and ruled the neighborhood "battlefield" for a summer :)
danso 13y ago
I'm sure much has been written about the inventor, Lonnie Johnson, already, but if he were a young kid today -- or, perhaps, had more coverage for inventing a billion dollar toy -- he'd be as revered as Elon Musk by HN, for being both a rich entrepreneur and an esteemed hacker. From the OP: > Johnson, a nuclear engineer, Tuskegee University Ph.D. and former NASA scientist, founded his company in 1989. It was the same year he first licensed the Super Soaker, which generated more than $200 million in retail sales two years later, the company said. The toy was licensed to Larami Corp., which was later purchased by Hasbro. > Johnson holds more than 80 patents, with more than 20 pending, the company said, which said sales of the Super Soaker have approached nearly $1 billion. > As an Alabama high school senior, Johnson finished building a remote-controlled robot with a reel-to-reel tape player for a brain and jukebox solenoids controlling its pneumatic limbs, according to a 2008 profile in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. edit: This 2001 NYT profile is even more fascinating: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/31/science/engineer-at-play-lonnie-johnson-rocket-science-served-up-soggy.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/31/science/engineer-at-play-l... > In the late 1970's, he worked at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory in Albuquerque, overseeing the safety of projects involving space nuclear power. > In 1979, he moved to California and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, an aerospace mecca. > There his nuclear skills helped integrate an atomic power plant into Galileo, a $1.6 billion spacecraft destined to study Jupiter and its 16 moons. It needed an atomic battery because sunlight would be too weak there to power solar panels. > David M. Durham, a spacecraft engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recalled that Mr. Johnson was known not only for professional excellence but for testing his wife's patience with his moonlighting. > ''At one point, his wife nearly threw him out of the house because all he did was tinker,'' he said. After minor successes with inventions, he added, Mr. Johnson finally ''came up with one that allowed him to no longer have to work for anybody.'' > It happened in 1982 while Mr. Johnson was working at home on a new kind of cooling device. At that time, refrigerators often used Freon, a gas that destroys the earth's ozone layer. He envisioned one that ran on water. It would not only be efficient but would also be environmentally friendly.
- sitkack 13y ago
  I learned about Lonnie when I read his patent on the super soaker. Huge respect.
  - KevinEldon 13y ago
    Patent #5,074,437. Can be found here: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5074437.PN.&OS=PN/5074437&RS=PN/5074437 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...
meritt 13y ago
HN should start having a "hacker of the week" or something, notable people to admire and inspire. We could start with Lonnie Johnson.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- fit2rule 13y ago
  I was just about to suggest an AMA with him, but then I realized .. HN doesn't do that. Or does it? (Haven't noticed) Either way, Mr. Johnson certainly appears to be the kind of engineer a lot of people aspire to be .. On one end of the spectrum, a kids toy. On the other end of the spectrum: multiple successful space probes. Yikes! The guys kicks ass!
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    HN goes about AMAs by getting them to post here. Then people ask them random questions whenever they want. There's no focused idea of an AMA. I think because there's very little celebrity worship on HN compared to other sites. People here tend to look at others' accomplishments and say, "I can do that."
    - fit2rule 13y ago
      > I think because there's very little celebrity worship on HN compared to other sites. Glad you added the qualifier "compared to other sites" there .. because I see a lot of hero worship on HN. (Steve Jobs, Paul Graham, &etc.) However it seems to be a lot less robotic. I hope we can one day get Mr. Johnson to answer a few questions - I agree with other commenters that he is indeed an inspiration and it'd be great for my kids to know more about him. Oops, there I go, creating a hero to worship .. ;)
      - mbell 13y ago
        I find that HN has a slightly different version of worship. Posts by some folks such as PG get auto-voted to the top, but at the same time quite often the replies to the post are far different than on other sites. To use PG as an example I've often found that replies to his posts that make it to the top are well thought out disagreements/counterpoints which instigates further discussion. On the other hand, disagreeing with an AMA response on reddit gets you downvoted into oblivion unless the reddit hive mind already hates the AMAer.
rdw 13y ago
What's interesting to me about this story in light of current events is that Johnson Research and Development Co., seems in many ways like an NPE. He doesn't make products directly, he simply licenses the patents to other companies that do make the products, and sometimes sues them. Obviously, he's not a patent troll, but what's the bright line between what he does and what a patent troll does? This is a critical question in the patent troll discussion, because it is absolutely the case that every Intellectual Ventures, Lodsys, and Rockstar thinks of themselves as being innovative inventors like Lonnie Johnson. They'll hold independent inventors like him up whenever legislation is proposed and say that it'll hurt good old-fashioned American invention, and maybe they'll even be right. It's critical that there be a clear division there, or else reform will never go through, or worse, end up hurting actual inventors. How can that line be drawn?
- wging 13y ago
  >it is absolutely the case that every Intellectual Ventures, Lodsys, and Rockstar thinks of themselves as being innovative inventors like Lonnie Johnson. How sure are you about that? If they acquire patents, how could they possibly believe that?
  - rdw 13y ago
    Intellectual Ventures actually does create the patents. We think they're for obvious, trivial ideas, but they definitely create them. (I guess they don't actually sue other companies directly, either.) My understanding was that it's likely that some of the people who work at Rockstar are the inventors of some of the held patents. Maybe not the key patents, but it's a company holding a lot of patents and employing a bunch of engineers, there's almost certainly some overlap. I agree that the transfer of ownership of patents is a potential aspect of a dividing line, that seems to be a common theme. But it seems like it wouldn't be too difficult for a patent troll to skirt this by "employing" an inventor, or somehow wedging the name of one of their employees into the inventors list for every patent.
    - dagw 13y ago
moocowduckquack 13y ago
I hope it helps him build his JTEC thingy - http://www.parc.com/event/713/high-efficiency-solid-state-engine.html http://www.parc.com/event/713/high-efficiency-solid-state-en...
bstar77 13y ago
This story seems very similar to the universal wrench story here: http://abcnews.go.com/US/MadeInAmerica/wrench-inventor-claims-sears-stole-idea-china/story?id=17720122 http://abcnews.go.com/US/MadeInAmerica/wrench-inventor-claim... It seems to be a disturbing trend where large companies get into business agreements with small time inventors, then do everything possible to screw them out of royalties by creating cheap knock-off products with trivial differences.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pjmorris 13y ago
I remember first seeing a Super Soaker in a Toys 'R Us sometime in 1991 (I think), and thinking 'That's genius'. I'm glad to know the guy who made it 'got paid'.
kamjam 13y ago
Johnson also wanted the court to force Hasbro to open its books to determine sales of Super Soaker products from 2006 to 20012. That's a lot of sales they're disputing :-p
kanamekun 13y ago
Was curious how the Super Soaker worked, and came across this great summary from How Stuff Works: http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/water-blaster3.htm http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/water-blaster3.htm http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/water-blaster4.htm http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/water-blaster4.htm
- warmwaffles 13y ago
  As a kid, I knew what the back tank did just based on observation. I am so glad I learned that I knew about 50% of how it actually worked. TIL this was a great simple design.
URSpider94 13y ago
It's very interesting that everyone appears to unanimously agree that Johnson is not a patent troll, but it's hard to figure out exactly why. People said it's because he made a legitimate product. From what I can see, Johnson Research and Development Co. never shipped a single Super Soaker -- 100% of their revenue is from licensing. People said it's because he had a licensing agreement first. What if Larami had refused to sign a licensing agreement with him in the first place, ripped off his design, and he'd had to resort to a suit to get paid? People said that it's because Hasbro explicitly used his design as a starting point. What if they invented their own water guns after seeing his prototype at a trade show, and then thumbed their nose at him? What if they "independently" invented their own water gun without seeing his? If you're telling me that there's a difference between these two cases, then you're saying that the courts need to determine intent and foreknowledge. What if someone from Hasbro was at the trade show where he exhibited, but just claimed not to have seen his booth? What if he had approached Hasbro for a license, and they claimed that their internal team was not aware of those discussions? People said it's because he is the original inventor. What if he'd despaired of ever beating Hasbro in court and licensed his patent to Acacia so that they could go after Hasbro? Finally, people are saying that the problem is that the inventions of patent trolls are "obvious". Is putting a battery-powered pump in a water gun a non-obvious invention worthy of patent protection? Batteries, pumps and water guns all existed before this -- what's the innovation here?
- ScottBurson 13y ago
  Is putting a battery-powered pump in a water gun a non-obvious invention worthy of patent protection? Batteries, pumps and water guns all existed before this -- what's the innovation here? This is an excellent question. Let me offer a possible answer. It seems to me that the very fact that batteries, pumps, and water guns had all existed for some time, and yet nobody until Johnson thought to put them together, in itself constitutes evidence that the idea was nonobvious. It seems to me that a lot of the problem patents we have seen in recent years involve relatively new technologies. For example, once we had low-cost scanners, and once file transmission by email became common, scan-to-email was an obvious idea. But it wasn't so obvious that one of the first people to think of it (almost certainly not the very first) wasn't able to obtain a patent on it. Therein, I think, lies the problem: when a new technology shows up, the PTO simply has no way to know what applications of it count as obvious -- it hasn't been around long enough for the obvious ones to have been thought of already. Under such circumstances the PTO should be very careful about granting patents. I think a reasonable guideline would be that once a new technology begins to be widely used, the PTO should assume that any idea that simply combines the new technology with existing techniques, or applies it to well-known problems in a straightforward way, is obvious. This would have ruled out all the "X, but on the Internet" patents we have seen go by. As I have written previously, a deeper problem with our system is this. A patent is a trade: we give the inventor a time-limited monopoly in exchange for disclosure of the invention. But there's no one unambiguously charged with making sure we got a good deal: that the value of the disclosure outweighs the cost of the monopoly. While this is technically the PTO's responsibility, its management and incentive structures aren't set up with this goal paramount. This pushes the problem to the courts; but the courts tend to defer to the PTO's judgment. So really, there's nobody minding the store.

183 points by shill 13y ago

Who do these corporate conglomerates think they are by trying to con inventors from their due? This happens all too often. These corporations love to lord their patents over everyone else but refuse to pay up when it is clear they not only have a legal obligation, but a moral one as well. Note, Robert Kearns, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns.

reneherse 13y ago

Ha, awesome to know that the Super Soaker came from such a brilliant inventor and businessman! Lots of good memories with those things... As a kid I hacked my own extra powerful version using a bicycle frame pump, soda bottles, pvc pipe, copper tubing and brass valves, and ruled the neighborhood "battlefield" for a summer :)

danso 13y ago

I'm sure much has been written about the inventor, Lonnie Johnson, already, but if he were a young kid today -- or, perhaps, had more coverage for inventing a billion dollar toy -- he'd be as revered as Elon Musk by HN, for being both a rich entrepreneur and an esteemed hacker. From the OP: > Johnson, a nuclear engineer, Tuskegee University Ph.D. and former NASA scientist, founded his company in 1989. It was the same year he first licensed the Super Soaker, which generated more than $200 million in retail sales two years later, the company said. The toy was licensed to Larami Corp., which was later purchased by Hasbro. > Johnson holds more than 80 patents, with more than 20 pending, the company said, which said sales of the Super Soaker have approached nearly $1 billion. > As an Alabama high school senior, Johnson finished building a remote-controlled robot with a reel-to-reel tape player for a brain and jukebox solenoids controlling its pneumatic limbs, according to a 2008 profile in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. edit: This 2001 NYT profile is even more fascinating: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/31/science/engineer-at-play-lonnie-johnson-rocket-science-served-up-soggy.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/31/science/engineer-at-play-l... > In the late 1970's, he worked at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory in Albuquerque, overseeing the safety of projects involving space nuclear power. > In 1979, he moved to California and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, an aerospace mecca. > There his nuclear skills helped integrate an atomic power plant into Galileo, a $1.6 billion spacecraft destined to study Jupiter and its 16 moons. It needed an atomic battery because sunlight would be too weak there to power solar panels. > David M. Durham, a spacecraft engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recalled that Mr. Johnson was known not only for professional excellence but for testing his wife's patience with his moonlighting. > ''At one point, his wife nearly threw him out of the house because all he did was tinker,'' he said. After minor successes with inventions, he added, Mr. Johnson finally ''came up with one that allowed him to no longer have to work for anybody.'' > It happened in 1982 while Mr. Johnson was working at home on a new kind of cooling device. At that time, refrigerators often used Freon, a gas that destroys the earth's ozone layer. He envisioned one that ran on water. It would not only be efficient but would also be environmentally friendly.

sitkack 13y ago
I learned about Lonnie when I read his patent on the super soaker. Huge respect.
- KevinEldon 13y ago
  Patent #5,074,437. Can be found here: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5074437.PN.&OS=PN/5074437&RS=PN/5074437 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...

meritt 13y ago

HN should start having a "hacker of the week" or something, notable people to admire and inspire. We could start with Lonnie Johnson.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
fit2rule 13y ago
I was just about to suggest an AMA with him, but then I realized .. HN doesn't do that. Or does it? (Haven't noticed) Either way, Mr. Johnson certainly appears to be the kind of engineer a lot of people aspire to be .. On one end of the spectrum, a kids toy. On the other end of the spectrum: multiple successful space probes. Yikes! The guys kicks ass!
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  HN goes about AMAs by getting them to post here. Then people ask them random questions whenever they want. There's no focused idea of an AMA. I think because there's very little celebrity worship on HN compared to other sites. People here tend to look at others' accomplishments and say, "I can do that."
  - fit2rule 13y ago
    > I think because there's very little celebrity worship on HN compared to other sites. Glad you added the qualifier "compared to other sites" there .. because I see a lot of hero worship on HN. (Steve Jobs, Paul Graham, &etc.) However it seems to be a lot less robotic. I hope we can one day get Mr. Johnson to answer a few questions - I agree with other commenters that he is indeed an inspiration and it'd be great for my kids to know more about him. Oops, there I go, creating a hero to worship .. ;)
    - mbell 13y ago
      I find that HN has a slightly different version of worship. Posts by some folks such as PG get auto-voted to the top, but at the same time quite often the replies to the post are far different than on other sites. To use PG as an example I've often found that replies to his posts that make it to the top are well thought out disagreements/counterpoints which instigates further discussion. On the other hand, disagreeing with an AMA response on reddit gets you downvoted into oblivion unless the reddit hive mind already hates the AMAer.

rdw 13y ago

What's interesting to me about this story in light of current events is that Johnson Research and Development Co., seems in many ways like an NPE. He doesn't make products directly, he simply licenses the patents to other companies that do make the products, and sometimes sues them. Obviously, he's not a patent troll, but what's the bright line between what he does and what a patent troll does? This is a critical question in the patent troll discussion, because it is absolutely the case that every Intellectual Ventures, Lodsys, and Rockstar thinks of themselves as being innovative inventors like Lonnie Johnson. They'll hold independent inventors like him up whenever legislation is proposed and say that it'll hurt good old-fashioned American invention, and maybe they'll even be right. It's critical that there be a clear division there, or else reform will never go through, or worse, end up hurting actual inventors. How can that line be drawn?

wging 13y ago
>it is absolutely the case that every Intellectual Ventures, Lodsys, and Rockstar thinks of themselves as being innovative inventors like Lonnie Johnson. How sure are you about that? If they acquire patents, how could they possibly believe that?
- rdw 13y ago
  Intellectual Ventures actually does create the patents. We think they're for obvious, trivial ideas, but they definitely create them. (I guess they don't actually sue other companies directly, either.) My understanding was that it's likely that some of the people who work at Rockstar are the inventors of some of the held patents. Maybe not the key patents, but it's a company holding a lot of patents and employing a bunch of engineers, there's almost certainly some overlap. I agree that the transfer of ownership of patents is a potential aspect of a dividing line, that seems to be a common theme. But it seems like it wouldn't be too difficult for a patent troll to skirt this by "employing" an inventor, or somehow wedging the name of one of their employees into the inventors list for every patent.
  - dagw 13y ago

moocowduckquack 13y ago

I hope it helps him build his JTEC thingy - http://www.parc.com/event/713/high-efficiency-solid-state-engine.html http://www.parc.com/event/713/high-efficiency-solid-state-en...

bstar77 13y ago

This story seems very similar to the universal wrench story here: http://abcnews.go.com/US/MadeInAmerica/wrench-inventor-claims-sears-stole-idea-china/story?id=17720122 http://abcnews.go.com/US/MadeInAmerica/wrench-inventor-claim... It seems to be a disturbing trend where large companies get into business agreements with small time inventors, then do everything possible to screw them out of royalties by creating cheap knock-off products with trivial differences.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

pjmorris 13y ago

I remember first seeing a Super Soaker in a Toys 'R Us sometime in 1991 (I think), and thinking 'That's genius'. I'm glad to know the guy who made it 'got paid'.

kamjam 13y ago

Johnson also wanted the court to force Hasbro to open its books to determine sales of Super Soaker products from 2006 to 20012. That's a lot of sales they're disputing :-p

kanamekun 13y ago

Was curious how the Super Soaker worked, and came across this great summary from How Stuff Works: http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/water-blaster3.htm http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/water-blaster3.htm http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/water-blaster4.htm http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/water-blaster4.htm

warmwaffles 13y ago
As a kid, I knew what the back tank did just based on observation. I am so glad I learned that I knew about 50% of how it actually worked. TIL this was a great simple design.

URSpider94 13y ago

It's very interesting that everyone appears to unanimously agree that Johnson is not a patent troll, but it's hard to figure out exactly why. People said it's because he made a legitimate product. From what I can see, Johnson Research and Development Co. never shipped a single Super Soaker -- 100% of their revenue is from licensing. People said it's because he had a licensing agreement first. What if Larami had refused to sign a licensing agreement with him in the first place, ripped off his design, and he'd had to resort to a suit to get paid? People said that it's because Hasbro explicitly used his design as a starting point. What if they invented their own water guns after seeing his prototype at a trade show, and then thumbed their nose at him? What if they "independently" invented their own water gun without seeing his? If you're telling me that there's a difference between these two cases, then you're saying that the courts need to determine intent and foreknowledge. What if someone from Hasbro was at the trade show where he exhibited, but just claimed not to have seen his booth? What if he had approached Hasbro for a license, and they claimed that their internal team was not aware of those discussions? People said it's because he is the original inventor. What if he'd despaired of ever beating Hasbro in court and licensed his patent to Acacia so that they could go after Hasbro? Finally, people are saying that the problem is that the inventions of patent trolls are "obvious". Is putting a battery-powered pump in a water gun a non-obvious invention worthy of patent protection? Batteries, pumps and water guns all existed before this -- what's the innovation here?

ScottBurson 13y ago
Is putting a battery-powered pump in a water gun a non-obvious invention worthy of patent protection? Batteries, pumps and water guns all existed before this -- what's the innovation here? This is an excellent question. Let me offer a possible answer. It seems to me that the very fact that batteries, pumps, and water guns had all existed for some time, and yet nobody until Johnson thought to put them together, in itself constitutes evidence that the idea was nonobvious. It seems to me that a lot of the problem patents we have seen in recent years involve relatively new technologies. For example, once we had low-cost scanners, and once file transmission by email became common, scan-to-email was an obvious idea. But it wasn't so obvious that one of the first people to think of it (almost certainly not the very first) wasn't able to obtain a patent on it. Therein, I think, lies the problem: when a new technology shows up, the PTO simply has no way to know what applications of it count as obvious -- it hasn't been around long enough for the obvious ones to have been thought of already. Under such circumstances the PTO should be very careful about granting patents. I think a reasonable guideline would be that once a new technology begins to be widely used, the PTO should assume that any idea that simply combines the new technology with existing techniques, or applies it to well-known problems in a straightforward way, is obvious. This would have ruled out all the "X, but on the Internet" patents we have seen go by. As I have written previously, a deeper problem with our system is this. A patent is a trade: we give the inventor a time-limited monopoly in exchange for disclosure of the invention. But there's no one unambiguously charged with making sure we got a good deal: that the value of the disclosure outweighs the cost of the monopoly. While this is technically the PTO's responsibility, its management and incentive structures aren't set up with this goal paramount. This pushes the problem to the courts; but the courts tend to defer to the PTO's judgment. So really, there's nobody minding the store.