5 ms·

How Inventors Always Get Screwed

12 points by asciilifeform 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago
Anecdotal evidence: I know an inventor that got screwed -> inventors always get screwed. It does not hold water, there are plenty of inventors that did really well from their inventions, there are also quite a few that did not profit at all. On the whole it is as with any other creative job, if you're not good in both the business side and the creative side team up with somebody who is (it still exposes you to the risk that they'll take your money). The Armstrong story is quite sad by the way, he committed suicide because he lost a patent fight he should have won.
CamperBob 17y ago
The windshield-wiper story has always bothered me. I'm sorry, call me a Communist or something, but nobody deserves $30 million for "inventing" an intermittent windshield wiper. Can you imagine what it would do to our cost of living, not to mention the progress of technology, if we had to reward "inventors" across all market segments by that standard? To me, the Kearns case was just an early example of an obvious patent that would never have been granted by any examiner smart enough to fog a mirror.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  A contrary point of view would be that if the incremental improvement in performance of a variable-speed wiper is worth one cent (or one dollar, or whatever) over the performance of a constant-speed wiper for each driver on the roadways of this country, it makes perfect economic sense for the pioneer who brings about that improvement to enjoy a license fee that car manufacturers pass on to each driver for the duration of a patent. Patents don't last forever, but they are intended to be lucrative enough to get someone out of the starting blocks to DO something about implementing a new improvement.
  - CamperBob 17y ago
    Here's one way to counter that argument: let's say you run a car manufacturer. You don't happen to know about the Kearns patent, but one day while driving home in an intermittent rainstorm, you find yourself wishing your wipers didn't have to run continuously. When you get to work the next day you stop by the engineering department and say "Hey, Joe, stick a 555 timer in that windshield relay circuit, would you?" Five years and several million cars later, Kearns jumps out of the bushes and whacks you in the kneecap with a lawsuit. What should your penalty be? Do you agree with the judge that you owe some guy $10,000,000 for a trivial idea that he happened to have before you did?
    - padmanabhan01 17y ago
      We shouldn't ignore the effect of hindsight. Lot of ideas that we think today as obvious or straight forward, may not have been all that obvious before it got popular. In that movie, Ford and Chrysler engineers apparently had trouble duplicating his model. That said, Its not about how simple or how hard an idea is right? Its about how much value it adds. EDIT: In your example, as long as it is not willful infringement and as long as he started making them before he patented it, there will not be any penalty. But in case of ford and Chrysler, its willful infringement.
      - CamperBob 17y ago
        There's still a penalty for non-willful infringement; if nothing else, the inventor can request an injunction that shuts down your whole production line. That's the scary thing about patents... unless you have comprehensive knowledge of every patent in your field of endeavor, they are financial time bombs. If the plaintiff can show that you did know about the patent and infringe it willfully, the damages are tripled.
    - tokenadult 17y ago
      Well, that is why patent law keeps lots of lawyers busy. There is a principle of "nonobviousness" in patent law that requires enough engineering or science knowledge that most patent lawyers are persons with undergraduate degrees in engineering or science.
- anamax 17y ago
  > Can you imagine what it would do to our cost of living, not to mention the progress of technology, if we had to reward "inventors" across all market segments by that standard? Our cost of living would go down and progress would go up if more folks invented stuff because there was money in it. Why is that a bad thing?
  - frig 17y ago
    For there to be money in 'inventing stuff' -- at least in the form of an incentive -- potential inventors have to believe there's enough possibility of there being money in 'inventing stuff' that 'inventing stuff' is worthwhile. It's entirely possible to imagine a patent system that would work against the goals of lowering the cost of living and making progress 'go up'; such a system would be one in which: - patent infringement carries heavy penalties when successfully prosecuted - individual patent licenses must be negotiated individually; there's nothing resembling a compulsory licensing scheme - researching the existing body of patents is difficult, expensive, and often inconclusive (bonus points: in addition to upfront cost of researching, actually having done the research potentially opens you to steeper penalties than would be the case had you not done the research) - so many patents have been granted that in many fields it is hard to produce a product without using patented technology in some way (either by infringement or by licensing) - maintaining ownership of a patent carries minimal ongoing expense, carries no obligation to put the patent to use (in licensing or in direct production) - there's essentially no economically significant 'time-out' or statute of limitations on filing charges for past infringement I leave as exercise to the reader deriving optimal strategies under such a system for inventors, patent-holding firms, and manufacturers. Whether the system we have resembles the system sketched above depends greatly upon who you ask, what field with which they happen to have the most experience, their previous professional background, and from whence their current livelihood derives.
- Tangurena 17y ago
  Can you imagine how much cheaper the car manufacturers would have gotten off if they hadn't ripped Kearns off, and taken decades in court to fight the guy? The car companies played scorched-earth tactics with the guy, and I'm glad they lost.
tokenadult 17y ago
This generalizes to a principle that all law students ought to learn in law school, or in their summer jobs during law school. A very typical form of new business partnership is the "brains-money" partnership, in which one partner provides the brilliant new business idea, and the other partner provides the capital. What is typically found in such partnerships is that the partner with the money controls the direction of the development of the partnership. That's not really terribly surprising to anyone who has ever formed a start-up.
wallflower 17y ago
> his tale of a true genius struggling against those out to steal the fruits of his brilliance. "You cannot develop a reputation for somebody who gives up. You have to be known as a fighter for your rights. Otherwise, you'll never license anything...Even Thomas Edison had a tough time supporting and protecting his patents. He spent about $1.4 million [to defend his inventions], and this was around the turn of the century, when beer was a nickel." -Jerome Lemelson Jerome Lemelson, who was arguably the most successful American inventor (in terms of money received, not brilliance - some of his 600 patents are questionable) in decades, was a patent-holder of many key patents relating to magnetic recording. And stuff like the flexible track used by Mattel's Matchbox cars. He spent years in court suing the big players like Sony to pay him licensing fees. He ultimately prevailed in many cases and now his foundation helps support patent rights for inventors and helps bootstrap and reward promising inventors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_H._Lemelson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_H._Lemelson

12 points by asciilifeform 17y ago

Anecdotal evidence: I know an inventor that got screwed -> inventors always get screwed. It does not hold water, there are plenty of inventors that did really well from their inventions, there are also quite a few that did not profit at all. On the whole it is as with any other creative job, if you're not good in both the business side and the creative side team up with somebody who is (it still exposes you to the risk that they'll take your money). The Armstrong story is quite sad by the way, he committed suicide because he lost a patent fight he should have won.

CamperBob 17y ago

The windshield-wiper story has always bothered me. I'm sorry, call me a Communist or something, but nobody deserves $30 million for "inventing" an intermittent windshield wiper. Can you imagine what it would do to our cost of living, not to mention the progress of technology, if we had to reward "inventors" across all market segments by that standard? To me, the Kearns case was just an early example of an obvious patent that would never have been granted by any examiner smart enough to fog a mirror.

tokenadult 17y ago
A contrary point of view would be that if the incremental improvement in performance of a variable-speed wiper is worth one cent (or one dollar, or whatever) over the performance of a constant-speed wiper for each driver on the roadways of this country, it makes perfect economic sense for the pioneer who brings about that improvement to enjoy a license fee that car manufacturers pass on to each driver for the duration of a patent. Patents don't last forever, but they are intended to be lucrative enough to get someone out of the starting blocks to DO something about implementing a new improvement.
- CamperBob 17y ago
  Here's one way to counter that argument: let's say you run a car manufacturer. You don't happen to know about the Kearns patent, but one day while driving home in an intermittent rainstorm, you find yourself wishing your wipers didn't have to run continuously. When you get to work the next day you stop by the engineering department and say "Hey, Joe, stick a 555 timer in that windshield relay circuit, would you?" Five years and several million cars later, Kearns jumps out of the bushes and whacks you in the kneecap with a lawsuit. What should your penalty be? Do you agree with the judge that you owe some guy $10,000,000 for a trivial idea that he happened to have before you did?
  - padmanabhan01 17y ago
    We shouldn't ignore the effect of hindsight. Lot of ideas that we think today as obvious or straight forward, may not have been all that obvious before it got popular. In that movie, Ford and Chrysler engineers apparently had trouble duplicating his model. That said, Its not about how simple or how hard an idea is right? Its about how much value it adds. EDIT: In your example, as long as it is not willful infringement and as long as he started making them before he patented it, there will not be any penalty. But in case of ford and Chrysler, its willful infringement.
    - CamperBob 17y ago
      There's still a penalty for non-willful infringement; if nothing else, the inventor can request an injunction that shuts down your whole production line. That's the scary thing about patents... unless you have comprehensive knowledge of every patent in your field of endeavor, they are financial time bombs. If the plaintiff can show that you did know about the patent and infringe it willfully, the damages are tripled.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    Well, that is why patent law keeps lots of lawyers busy. There is a principle of "nonobviousness" in patent law that requires enough engineering or science knowledge that most patent lawyers are persons with undergraduate degrees in engineering or science.
anamax 17y ago
> Can you imagine what it would do to our cost of living, not to mention the progress of technology, if we had to reward "inventors" across all market segments by that standard? Our cost of living would go down and progress would go up if more folks invented stuff because there was money in it. Why is that a bad thing?
- frig 17y ago
  For there to be money in 'inventing stuff' -- at least in the form of an incentive -- potential inventors have to believe there's enough possibility of there being money in 'inventing stuff' that 'inventing stuff' is worthwhile. It's entirely possible to imagine a patent system that would work against the goals of lowering the cost of living and making progress 'go up'; such a system would be one in which: - patent infringement carries heavy penalties when successfully prosecuted - individual patent licenses must be negotiated individually; there's nothing resembling a compulsory licensing scheme - researching the existing body of patents is difficult, expensive, and often inconclusive (bonus points: in addition to upfront cost of researching, actually having done the research potentially opens you to steeper penalties than would be the case had you not done the research) - so many patents have been granted that in many fields it is hard to produce a product without using patented technology in some way (either by infringement or by licensing) - maintaining ownership of a patent carries minimal ongoing expense, carries no obligation to put the patent to use (in licensing or in direct production) - there's essentially no economically significant 'time-out' or statute of limitations on filing charges for past infringement I leave as exercise to the reader deriving optimal strategies under such a system for inventors, patent-holding firms, and manufacturers. Whether the system we have resembles the system sketched above depends greatly upon who you ask, what field with which they happen to have the most experience, their previous professional background, and from whence their current livelihood derives.
Tangurena 17y ago
Can you imagine how much cheaper the car manufacturers would have gotten off if they hadn't ripped Kearns off, and taken decades in court to fight the guy? The car companies played scorched-earth tactics with the guy, and I'm glad they lost.

tokenadult 17y ago

This generalizes to a principle that all law students ought to learn in law school, or in their summer jobs during law school. A very typical form of new business partnership is the "brains-money" partnership, in which one partner provides the brilliant new business idea, and the other partner provides the capital. What is typically found in such partnerships is that the partner with the money controls the direction of the development of the partnership. That's not really terribly surprising to anyone who has ever formed a start-up.

wallflower 17y ago

> his tale of a true genius struggling against those out to steal the fruits of his brilliance. "You cannot develop a reputation for somebody who gives up. You have to be known as a fighter for your rights. Otherwise, you'll never license anything...Even Thomas Edison had a tough time supporting and protecting his patents. He spent about $1.4 million [to defend his inventions], and this was around the turn of the century, when beer was a nickel." -Jerome Lemelson Jerome Lemelson, who was arguably the most successful American inventor (in terms of money received, not brilliance - some of his 600 patents are questionable) in decades, was a patent-holder of many key patents relating to magnetic recording. And stuff like the flexible track used by Mattel's Matchbox cars. He spent years in court suing the big players like Sony to pay him licensing fees. He ultimately prevailed in many cases and now his foundation helps support patent rights for inventors and helps bootstrap and reward promising inventors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_H._Lemelson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_H._Lemelson