8 ms·

Greed and the Wright Brothers

201 points by kanamekun 13y ago

rmason 13y ago
If you should ever visit Nova Scotia's North island do not miss the Alexander Graham Bell museum in Baddeck. Bell employed Glenn Curtiss to work on an airplane which is up in the rafters of the museum. For whatever reason Bell lost interest in aviation leaving Glenn Curtiss to launch his own company. The guides spend quite a bit of time talking about what Curtiss accomplished while he was at Baddeck. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell_National_Historic_Site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell_National_...
- cdr 13y ago
  The Curtiss Museum in the finger lakes area of central New York state is also very neat. Curtiss was born in Hammondsport on Keuka Lake and spent most of his life there. http://www.glennhcurtissmuseum.org/ http://www.glennhcurtissmuseum.org/
joe_the_user 13y ago
It is fascinating how those who begin as "doers" and innovator can end up having their entire activity controlled by something as inactive and uninnovative as the legal system? I wonder if it is the situation of having achieved a palpably fundamental innovation leaves someone open to thinking that the world owes them success.
- Tloewald 13y ago
  The world is in no way short of people who think the world owes them a living. Didn't a recent survey show that over half of all programmers think they're going to be millionaires? Ah yes, invent a better mousetrap and blah blah blah. In what way is the legal system not innovative? Sure, it relies on precedent, but look at the innovative ways precedent is used. The problem isn't lack of innovation so much as the purposes to which it is put.
  - randomdata 13y ago
    > Didn't a recent survey show that over half of all programmers think they're going to be millionaires? Seems pretty reasonable. Rule of thumb is to save 10% of your income. Median income of programmers is reported to be $90,000, which is roughly $67,000 after tax in my location. That annual addition compounded at 5% works out to $900K over the course of a typical career. And that is just in cash savings. Another rule of thumb is spend 30% of your income on a home. If you use that to buy, that adds another, say, $400,000 to your net worth and we should be safely able to assume another $300,000 once the home is paid for if you redirect those payments into savings. Add in an earning partner and the numbers get even larger. And while prices can fluctuate, those numbers have historically gone up, which means decades from now you will probably be making more than $90K, and your home will probably be worth more than $400K. I'm more interested in why half of the programmers surveyed don't think they will be millionaires. You don't even have to make the median income I proposed earlier to get there. Quite a bit less will do.
  - joe_the_user 13y ago
    In what way is the legal system not innovative? Context, context, context! While we could get into a whole argument about the legal system itself is innovative, you could instead note that point is that my point and the point of the parent article is that a person who occupies themselves in suing someone is not engaging in innovation. Now do you really disagree with that?
- JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  Inventor of vaccine against syphilis - same storey.
rtb 13y ago
James Watt also spent much of his time and energy fighting patent battles in a hope to prevent others from entering the market. Who knows what further innovations he could have pursued if he hadn't been derailed by that greed. It looks like this is a recurring problem.
- hackbinary 13y ago
  It was largely Matthew Boulton who fought Watt's patent battles. Edward Bull worked for Watt and then attempted to rip off Watt's steam engine designs. Watt's key insight was a separate condenser, which made the steam engine much more efficient. Watt and Boulton's license fee was 1/3 of the coal saved from using the Newcomen Engine. Watt was not commercially successful until he met Boulton, and it is interesting to note that Watt also faced a patent problem. James Pickard had a patent for a crank to convert reciprocating motion to rotational power. Pickard wanted to simply cross license their respective patents, however with Watt's being significantly more valuable, Watt simply designed an alternate solution, sun and planet gear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watt
dalek_cannes 13y ago
> “That is, of course, the irony of the patent system. Without patent protection, a competitor can simply replicate an invention and undercut the inventor’s price — which necessarily includes all the time and expense of research and development — so the incentive to experiment and create is severely inhibited. But if innovators such as Glenn Curtiss cannot build on the progress of others without paying exorbitantly for the privilege, the incentive to continue to experiment and create is similarly inhibited.” That's not really irony. The patent system exists (or did exist) not to benefit the inventor, but to provide a mechanism by which he may share it with other people who want to build on it. The alternative was keeping trade secrets.
- cortesoft 13y ago
  For a lot of this stuff, trade secrets wouldn't really keep people from sharing innovation.... Anyone could have looked at a Wright airplane and figured out how the lateral stabilization worked.
- guelo 13y ago
  This is an oft-repeated lie. The point of patents, as stated in the US constitution, is to incentivize inventors by giving them a monopoly for a limited time. It says nothing about disclosure. Promoting disclosure doesn't make sense anyway since once an invention is commercialized it can usually be reverse-engineered. I don't understand where this idea comes from or why people always bring it up.
  - pcrh 13y ago
    If you want protection for an invention, you have to disclose what that invention is.
  - gojomo 13y ago
    The US Constitution didn't invent patents; it enabled them based on an earlier tradition. That tradition had come to include a descriptive/disclosure requirement, as part of the mechanism by which the patent promoted technological progress. The US Constitution's language is sufficiently open-ended –"promote the progress of science and useful arts" – that it covers not just incentivized conception but also the 'progress' of knowledge-diffusion (disclosure). Also, in that era, before mass-manufactured products or even a proper understanding of elements and molecules, it was far less likely that the delivered product itself embodied enough information to reverse-engineer the processes that made it. So: • not a lie; • the significance of disclosure is brought up because it was familiar to the authors of the US Constitution; • the Constitution's language is generic enough to include 'disclosure' as one aspect of the 'progress' it describes; • modern reasoning about the supposed ease of reverse-engineering doesn't apply to the early patent systems. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law#Development_of_the_modern_patent_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law#Developm...
ghshephard 13y ago
This was clearly a not-too veiled slam at Apple. Joe Nocera really needs to get over it. Yes, Steve Jobs lied to him about his health. Yes, he was made to look like and idiot for repeating those lies. Yes, that was a shitty thing for Steve to do (Steve Jobs acting like an asshole to someone - woah, shocker). But seriously, at this point you can't read anything that Joe Nocera writes without wondering what axe he is going to grind against Apple this time. He even wrote a glowing review of the universally panned "Haunted Empire", he's become so blinded by his dislike of Apple. He really needs to find a new schtick or at least present some more sophisticated nuance. Also note, Apple isn't suing Samsung over all Tablets/SmartPhones, or all general methods of building tablets/smartPhones, but very specific elements that Samsung just ripped off, rather than inventing their own approach. Microsoft has certainly been able to develop their own Tablets and Phone OS elements without having to blindly copy the iPhone/iPad - so it's certainly possible.
- joe_the_user 13y ago
  Please, I found the article fascinating in it's own right. The theme of greed and patents goes back a long way while Jobs' name is unmentioned in the article from reading and text-search. Jobs is kind of exception to the pattern in that he both innovated and sued, sometimes successfully, sometimes less-so. And the lying about health issue thing is bother irrelevant in this context and one of the smaller issue in any weighing of Jobs' sins and achievements.
  - ghshephard 13y ago
    I actually really liked the article standing by itself. But, the article is without question a commentary on Apple's recent litigious behavior, and, indeed, coming from other writer's might have been insightful. But I couldn't help but read it as another in a long thread of articles by Joe Nocera trying to slam Apple. Nocera's treatment by Job, including his statements about his health is the source of Nocera's ongoing diatribe's against Apple. The context is useful when reading essays knocking Apple by Nocera. I might have a little more patience if Nocera was a random blogger/pundit, but, I expect more out of the NYT. Yes, opinion, but balance and nuance is also important.
WalterBright 13y ago
Ailerons aren't really conceptually different from wing warping, it just uses a hinge rather than bending.
checker659 13y ago
If you invented it, you should be allowed to patent it. Especially, if it as ground breaking as flight would've been. I see no greed there. By that logic, the writer should head to North Korea and lead the life of a Comrade since the same could be said about capitalism too.
- jwdunne 13y ago
  Yeah but the Wrights invented a method to solve the lateral instability problem. They shouldn't be able to patent all solutions to a problem, just the solution they invented, surely?
  - option_greek 13y ago
    But how do they benefit from the fact that they realized lateral instability is a problem that needs solving to achieve stable flight ?
    - jwdunne 13y ago
      By preventing people from simply copying their solution with a patent on their method, which puts up a nice big barrier to entry to everyone except innovators such as Curtiss.
    - saalweachter 13y ago
      My non-informed opinion is that this is a basic science vs invention problem. The Wright brothers were both inventors designing an invention (an airplane) and private-sector researchers investigating the basic science of flight. Their discovery of the problem of lateral instability and its consequences for flight was a matter of basic science; for it they deserved recognition from their peers and scientific acclaim. Their invention of a method for stabilizing flight deserved a patent.
  - throwawaykf05 13y ago
    Thing is, as the courts and the USPTO found time and again, pretty much all subsequent solutions to that problem were non-significant variations of the Wrights' patent. Even Curtiss' own aileron patent was invalidated because the Wright patent was prior art.
throwawaykf05 13y ago
No, the Wright brothers' patents did not hold up the US aviation industry: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2355673 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2355673 Although the introduction reads something like a conspiracy theory, this paper does a decent job of providing historical industrial data and references as evidence that despite the various patents at play, the aviation industry in the years leading up to and during WW1 was actually doing well.
zby 13y ago
For more examples see: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h... And join a Pirate Party of your location!
asmithmd1 13y ago
I think the real answer is compulsory licensing of patents. Congress thought the ownership of something as trivial as a song was so important they wrote laws to compel songwriters to license the performance of a song to any and all comers. Have you ever wondered how bands can "cover" other bands songs? They can because whoever wrote the song is forced by law to give them a license to perform it. Patents need to work the same way. Under current law the liabilities for infringing a patent are completely unbounded. If a potential user of a patent knew beforehand what the cost of using a patent was, they could make some real business decisions.
- vbuterin 13y ago
  The first step is to stop using the word "compulsory licensing". Compulsory licensing sounds like some kind of crazily authoritarian evil government regulation; if I didn't know what it actually is, and there were no triggers that convinced me the idea is worth taking an hour of my time to research, I would imagine I would instinctively oppose it. The language implicitly accepts that patents are a natural right, and that what it is proposing is an infringement on that right. In reality, of course, it's a limitation on a government-granted monopoly. Nobody is being "forced to give a license"; it's actually the derivative creator who is no longer forced to face unbounded cost when using something which was patented.
  - twic 13y ago
    Maybe it could be called something like "licensing by right" or "right-to-use", so casting it as a defence of something positive, rather than the imposition of something negative.
    - Zigurd 13y ago
      Isn't the word "statutory" used in similar contexts? So there would be a "statutory" maximum for, say, individual and total royalty costs in producing some product.
    - asmithmd1 13y ago
      "Right-to-use" sounds like something people could get behind. Congress needs to pass "Right-to-use" patent reform to prevent Saudi oil companies from buying up patents that increase gas mileage and preventing US companies from developing them into products. I don't think this has ever actually happened, but current patent law would allow it.
zachbeane 13y ago
See also http://idlewords.com/2003/12/100_years_of_turbulence.htm http://idlewords.com/2003/12/100_years_of_turbulence.htm, by HN-banned author and entrepreneur Maciej Cegłowski.
- flexie 13y ago
  HN-banned? Why? How? By whom? When?
  - JanezStupar 13y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108008 The whole affair is really sad. Especially due to high quality of Maciej's blog.
    - arjie 13y ago
      Interesting. So that's the story of the origin of lobste.rs.
  - username223 13y ago
    Personal animosity, I imagine: http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
- shiven 13y ago
  What-the-wha? The creator of pinboard.in, an awesome bookmarking site, is banned from HN? How? Why? Link?
- JasonFruit 13y ago
  That article is painfully flawed, though its point remains valid. What makes Alberto Santos-Dumont, a dedicated experimenter with a positive genius for simple solutions to baffling problems, a "one-man freakshow"? The author never explains, and it's not obvious to the reader. The author's dismissive analysis of the innovations of the Wright Flyer minimizes its advantages and inflates its idiosyncrasies beyond any sense of scale — and for what purpose? His frivolous distortion of fact does nothing to enhance his point.
Theodores 13y ago
On a bicycle the left hand pedal screws in one way and the right hand pedal screws in the other way. To anyone that has noticed it the reason is obvious - you don't want the pedals to fall out or work free over time, therefore it is common sense that the threads are different on each side. However, there was a time before 1900 when you did not have a left-hand thread on one of the two pedals on a bicycle. You probably didn't have bearings in the pedal either and the pedals really could fall out on the one side. It took the Wright Brothers to see this problem and come up with the solution of using the left-hand thread. Back then there were two patent offices in the U.S., one for bicycles and one for everything else. The Wright Brothers were awarded the patent even though the left hand thread was far from a new innovation, it was the application of that innovation that was what they could patent. This really was a must have feature for bicycles but history has this 'invention' as an interesting footnote to the Wright Brothers story, there are no generally known details as to how they were able to profit from it, which presumably they were able to do to some extent. There is also another Wright Bros. patent that comes before that. This is for some self-oiling hub. Nowadays bicycle hubs are packed with grease and the last thing you want to do is to oil them. However, once upon a time, oil was what you used to lubricate bearings, and still was the case with 3-speed 'Sturmey Archer' hub gears up until the 1970's. The Wright Brothers innovation was to use some bits of felt as seals, this prevented the oil running out when the bicycle was parked on its side. At that time there were literally hundreds and hundreds of variations on the humble bicycle hub, plus what we know today as a ball bearing had actually only been invented thirty years before hand. No thread sizes were standard so this small bit of engineering was more like home computers before the IBM PC - nothing compatible and all very new. Much like how the million and one different home computer variants that existed during the 1980's died a death as soon as the IBM PC (and clones) took over, a similar thing happened with bicycles back in the early 1900's. Parts became standardised, bicycles became mass produced and 'craft' manufacturers such as the Wright Bros. could not compete on price. It all happened very quickly, within a short space of time everything ended up being a variant of the Rover Safety Bicycle with Dunlop tyres. By the time of the 'Patent Wars' the Wright Brothers were quite experienced at applying and getting patents. I suspect that there is a lot more to the Wright Brothers history that needs to be understood, far beyond the potted back-story I mention here. It is also difficult for us to appreciate their inventions, because they are laid out before us. For instance the left-hand thread, the physics going on there are beyond 'well it could work free if the bearings seized', there is this concept of precession that needed some deep knowledge to understand. Similarly with the patent for controlling the plane, the Wright Brothers understood flight at a deeper level and I think they thought there patents should reflect that knowledge and disregard 'workarounds' such as what Curtiss came up with.
cfontes 13y ago
Interesting write up about Writght brothers and Santos Dumont. http://www.cnet.com/news/were-the-wright-brothers-really-first-not-in-brazil/ http://www.cnet.com/news/were-the-wright-brothers-really-fir... Disclaimer: I am Brazilian and I learned that Santos Dumont was the first one when I was little in school. I just find it interesting and wanted to share, No sides or flame wars. He was Brazil's Leonardo Da Vinci I guess.
- lotharbot 13y ago
  Likewise, Richard Pearse of New Zealand is sometimes considered the first. He was able to get airborne in early 1903, but not really able to maneuver. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse It's also worth reading about Sir George Cayley, Samuel Pierpont Langley, and Gustave Whitehead -- all aviation pioneers with some degree of success in the pre-Wright era. One of the main accomplishments of the Wright Brothers was that they continued to improve on those flights over the next several years, putting flight in the public eye -- their flights in 1908 and 1909 catapulted flight from "something a few people have claimed, but there's still a lot of skepticism" to "something everyone realized was really possible".
hyp0 13y ago
Their pop-over "you've read 5 of your 10 free articles this month" made me want to read the article more thoroughly, to make sure I didn't waste the resource/gift, thus increasing my engagement. It's valuable. Seems like an effective enhancement to freemium. The most sincere best advertising: the thing itself. And if it's not free, how will people know it's great? How will they develop a taste for it if they've never tasted it?
- rpgmaker 13y ago
  It's just a bullshit limit that gets in the way of my reading. More times than not I have _not_ read an article just because it's not worth the extra effort. I know the NYT doesn't care about losing my eyeball in that instance just as I don't care enough about the article to go the extra mile. It works for both of us.
lotsofmangos 13y ago
“That is, of course, the irony of the patent system. Without patent protection, a competitor can simply replicate an invention and undercut the inventor’s price — which necessarily includes all the time and expense of research and development — so the incentive to experiment and create is severely inhibited. But if innovators such as Glenn Curtiss cannot build on the progress of others without paying exorbitantly for the privilege, the incentive to continue to experiment and create is similarly inhibited.” I read this and wondered if the patent system could be reformed to have a standardised rate for all licensees, similar to what is attempted with FRAND patents, but enforced with teeth across all of them.
hyp0 13y ago
It's so sad, because the Wright Brothers really were innovative. Not just the control system of planes, but the system of discovering that: they realized that building and testing a whole aircraft was too time consuming (not to mention risky), so they made a wind tunnel, and ran years of tests on models. The first successful man-powered aircraft (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossamer_Condor http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossamer_Condor) also found ways to iterate more quickly. But, as a creator, I can really empathise with Wilbur Wright's feeling, tragic and short-sighted though it is: they thought of it; they put all their blood, sweat and tears into it, for years and years; they were the first to climb this mountain; therefore, it's their's. Though it seems more artistic ego than "greed" to me.
hammadfauz 13y ago
I just got an insight upon reading this. Patents stand to incentivize the research and development, the failures that precede innovations. On the other hand, they hinder research and development that builds on existing technology. A good middle-ground would be patents being applicable only on rights to create _products_ based on a technology. Rights for any products based on a derivative patent belong solely to that patent, with nothing going towards the 'parent' patent. This encourages the incremental innovation, as well as pushing the original inventor to continue to improve on their own patent. For example, let's imagine someone patented a glass bottle as a container for ketchup. Any glass ketchup bottle makers pay that person. A person examines that glass bottle, observes that breakage of glass is a problem, and patents a plastic ketchup bottle. All plastic bottle makers buy their rights from this person. Glass bottle makers (if any) continue to pay the original patent owner for their rights. The glass bottle person, improves upon the plastic bottle, and gets a patent for a squeezable plastic ketchup bottle...You get the idea. Discuss.

201 points by kanamekun 13y ago

If you should ever visit Nova Scotia's North island do not miss the Alexander Graham Bell museum in Baddeck. Bell employed Glenn Curtiss to work on an airplane which is up in the rafters of the museum. For whatever reason Bell lost interest in aviation leaving Glenn Curtiss to launch his own company. The guides spend quite a bit of time talking about what Curtiss accomplished while he was at Baddeck. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell_National_Historic_Site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell_National_...

cdr 13y ago
The Curtiss Museum in the finger lakes area of central New York state is also very neat. Curtiss was born in Hammondsport on Keuka Lake and spent most of his life there. http://www.glennhcurtissmuseum.org/ http://www.glennhcurtissmuseum.org/

joe_the_user 13y ago

It is fascinating how those who begin as "doers" and innovator can end up having their entire activity controlled by something as inactive and uninnovative as the legal system? I wonder if it is the situation of having achieved a palpably fundamental innovation leaves someone open to thinking that the world owes them success.

Tloewald 13y ago
The world is in no way short of people who think the world owes them a living. Didn't a recent survey show that over half of all programmers think they're going to be millionaires? Ah yes, invent a better mousetrap and blah blah blah. In what way is the legal system not innovative? Sure, it relies on precedent, but look at the innovative ways precedent is used. The problem isn't lack of innovation so much as the purposes to which it is put.
- randomdata 13y ago
  > Didn't a recent survey show that over half of all programmers think they're going to be millionaires? Seems pretty reasonable. Rule of thumb is to save 10% of your income. Median income of programmers is reported to be $90,000, which is roughly $67,000 after tax in my location. That annual addition compounded at 5% works out to $900K over the course of a typical career. And that is just in cash savings. Another rule of thumb is spend 30% of your income on a home. If you use that to buy, that adds another, say, $400,000 to your net worth and we should be safely able to assume another $300,000 once the home is paid for if you redirect those payments into savings. Add in an earning partner and the numbers get even larger. And while prices can fluctuate, those numbers have historically gone up, which means decades from now you will probably be making more than $90K, and your home will probably be worth more than $400K. I'm more interested in why half of the programmers surveyed don't think they will be millionaires. You don't even have to make the median income I proposed earlier to get there. Quite a bit less will do.
- joe_the_user 13y ago
  In what way is the legal system not innovative? Context, context, context! While we could get into a whole argument about the legal system itself is innovative, you could instead note that point is that my point and the point of the parent article is that a person who occupies themselves in suing someone is not engaging in innovation. Now do you really disagree with that?
JoeAltmaier 13y ago
Inventor of vaccine against syphilis - same storey.

rtb 13y ago

James Watt also spent much of his time and energy fighting patent battles in a hope to prevent others from entering the market. Who knows what further innovations he could have pursued if he hadn't been derailed by that greed. It looks like this is a recurring problem.

hackbinary 13y ago
It was largely Matthew Boulton who fought Watt's patent battles. Edward Bull worked for Watt and then attempted to rip off Watt's steam engine designs. Watt's key insight was a separate condenser, which made the steam engine much more efficient. Watt and Boulton's license fee was 1/3 of the coal saved from using the Newcomen Engine. Watt was not commercially successful until he met Boulton, and it is interesting to note that Watt also faced a patent problem. James Pickard had a patent for a crank to convert reciprocating motion to rotational power. Pickard wanted to simply cross license their respective patents, however with Watt's being significantly more valuable, Watt simply designed an alternate solution, sun and planet gear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watt

dalek_cannes 13y ago

> “That is, of course, the irony of the patent system. Without patent protection, a competitor can simply replicate an invention and undercut the inventor’s price — which necessarily includes all the time and expense of research and development — so the incentive to experiment and create is severely inhibited. But if innovators such as Glenn Curtiss cannot build on the progress of others without paying exorbitantly for the privilege, the incentive to continue to experiment and create is similarly inhibited.” That's not really irony. The patent system exists (or did exist) not to benefit the inventor, but to provide a mechanism by which he may share it with other people who want to build on it. The alternative was keeping trade secrets.

cortesoft 13y ago
For a lot of this stuff, trade secrets wouldn't really keep people from sharing innovation.... Anyone could have looked at a Wright airplane and figured out how the lateral stabilization worked.
guelo 13y ago
This is an oft-repeated lie. The point of patents, as stated in the US constitution, is to incentivize inventors by giving them a monopoly for a limited time. It says nothing about disclosure. Promoting disclosure doesn't make sense anyway since once an invention is commercialized it can usually be reverse-engineered. I don't understand where this idea comes from or why people always bring it up.
- pcrh 13y ago
  If you want protection for an invention, you have to disclose what that invention is.
- gojomo 13y ago
  The US Constitution didn't invent patents; it enabled them based on an earlier tradition. That tradition had come to include a descriptive/disclosure requirement, as part of the mechanism by which the patent promoted technological progress. The US Constitution's language is sufficiently open-ended –"promote the progress of science and useful arts" – that it covers not just incentivized conception but also the 'progress' of knowledge-diffusion (disclosure). Also, in that era, before mass-manufactured products or even a proper understanding of elements and molecules, it was far less likely that the delivered product itself embodied enough information to reverse-engineer the processes that made it. So: • not a lie; • the significance of disclosure is brought up because it was familiar to the authors of the US Constitution; • the Constitution's language is generic enough to include 'disclosure' as one aspect of the 'progress' it describes; • modern reasoning about the supposed ease of reverse-engineering doesn't apply to the early patent systems. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law#Development_of_the_modern_patent_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law#Developm...

ghshephard 13y ago

This was clearly a not-too veiled slam at Apple. Joe Nocera really needs to get over it. Yes, Steve Jobs lied to him about his health. Yes, he was made to look like and idiot for repeating those lies. Yes, that was a shitty thing for Steve to do (Steve Jobs acting like an asshole to someone - woah, shocker). But seriously, at this point you can't read anything that Joe Nocera writes without wondering what axe he is going to grind against Apple this time. He even wrote a glowing review of the universally panned "Haunted Empire", he's become so blinded by his dislike of Apple. He really needs to find a new schtick or at least present some more sophisticated nuance. Also note, Apple isn't suing Samsung over all Tablets/SmartPhones, or all general methods of building tablets/smartPhones, but very specific elements that Samsung just ripped off, rather than inventing their own approach. Microsoft has certainly been able to develop their own Tablets and Phone OS elements without having to blindly copy the iPhone/iPad - so it's certainly possible.

joe_the_user 13y ago
Please, I found the article fascinating in it's own right. The theme of greed and patents goes back a long way while Jobs' name is unmentioned in the article from reading and text-search. Jobs is kind of exception to the pattern in that he both innovated and sued, sometimes successfully, sometimes less-so. And the lying about health issue thing is bother irrelevant in this context and one of the smaller issue in any weighing of Jobs' sins and achievements.
- ghshephard 13y ago
  I actually really liked the article standing by itself. But, the article is without question a commentary on Apple's recent litigious behavior, and, indeed, coming from other writer's might have been insightful. But I couldn't help but read it as another in a long thread of articles by Joe Nocera trying to slam Apple. Nocera's treatment by Job, including his statements about his health is the source of Nocera's ongoing diatribe's against Apple. The context is useful when reading essays knocking Apple by Nocera. I might have a little more patience if Nocera was a random blogger/pundit, but, I expect more out of the NYT. Yes, opinion, but balance and nuance is also important.

WalterBright 13y ago

Ailerons aren't really conceptually different from wing warping, it just uses a hinge rather than bending.

checker659 13y ago

If you invented it, you should be allowed to patent it. Especially, if it as ground breaking as flight would've been. I see no greed there. By that logic, the writer should head to North Korea and lead the life of a Comrade since the same could be said about capitalism too.

jwdunne 13y ago
Yeah but the Wrights invented a method to solve the lateral instability problem. They shouldn't be able to patent all solutions to a problem, just the solution they invented, surely?
- option_greek 13y ago
  But how do they benefit from the fact that they realized lateral instability is a problem that needs solving to achieve stable flight ?
  - jwdunne 13y ago
    By preventing people from simply copying their solution with a patent on their method, which puts up a nice big barrier to entry to everyone except innovators such as Curtiss.
  - saalweachter 13y ago
    My non-informed opinion is that this is a basic science vs invention problem. The Wright brothers were both inventors designing an invention (an airplane) and private-sector researchers investigating the basic science of flight. Their discovery of the problem of lateral instability and its consequences for flight was a matter of basic science; for it they deserved recognition from their peers and scientific acclaim. Their invention of a method for stabilizing flight deserved a patent.
- throwawaykf05 13y ago
  Thing is, as the courts and the USPTO found time and again, pretty much all subsequent solutions to that problem were non-significant variations of the Wrights' patent. Even Curtiss' own aileron patent was invalidated because the Wright patent was prior art.

throwawaykf05 13y ago

No, the Wright brothers' patents did not hold up the US aviation industry: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2355673 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2355673 Although the introduction reads something like a conspiracy theory, this paper does a decent job of providing historical industrial data and references as evidence that despite the various patents at play, the aviation industry in the years leading up to and during WW1 was actually doing well.

zby 13y ago

For more examples see: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h... And join a Pirate Party of your location!

asmithmd1 13y ago

I think the real answer is compulsory licensing of patents. Congress thought the ownership of something as trivial as a song was so important they wrote laws to compel songwriters to license the performance of a song to any and all comers. Have you ever wondered how bands can "cover" other bands songs? They can because whoever wrote the song is forced by law to give them a license to perform it. Patents need to work the same way. Under current law the liabilities for infringing a patent are completely unbounded. If a potential user of a patent knew beforehand what the cost of using a patent was, they could make some real business decisions.

vbuterin 13y ago
The first step is to stop using the word "compulsory licensing". Compulsory licensing sounds like some kind of crazily authoritarian evil government regulation; if I didn't know what it actually is, and there were no triggers that convinced me the idea is worth taking an hour of my time to research, I would imagine I would instinctively oppose it. The language implicitly accepts that patents are a natural right, and that what it is proposing is an infringement on that right. In reality, of course, it's a limitation on a government-granted monopoly. Nobody is being "forced to give a license"; it's actually the derivative creator who is no longer forced to face unbounded cost when using something which was patented.
- twic 13y ago
  Maybe it could be called something like "licensing by right" or "right-to-use", so casting it as a defence of something positive, rather than the imposition of something negative.
  - Zigurd 13y ago
    Isn't the word "statutory" used in similar contexts? So there would be a "statutory" maximum for, say, individual and total royalty costs in producing some product.
  - asmithmd1 13y ago
    "Right-to-use" sounds like something people could get behind. Congress needs to pass "Right-to-use" patent reform to prevent Saudi oil companies from buying up patents that increase gas mileage and preventing US companies from developing them into products. I don't think this has ever actually happened, but current patent law would allow it.

zachbeane 13y ago

See also http://idlewords.com/2003/12/100_years_of_turbulence.htm http://idlewords.com/2003/12/100_years_of_turbulence.htm, by HN-banned author and entrepreneur Maciej Cegłowski.

flexie 13y ago
HN-banned? Why? How? By whom? When?
- JanezStupar 13y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108008 The whole affair is really sad. Especially due to high quality of Maciej's blog.
  - arjie 13y ago
    Interesting. So that's the story of the origin of lobste.rs.
- username223 13y ago
  Personal animosity, I imagine: http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
shiven 13y ago
What-the-wha? The creator of pinboard.in, an awesome bookmarking site, is banned from HN? How? Why? Link?
JasonFruit 13y ago
That article is painfully flawed, though its point remains valid. What makes Alberto Santos-Dumont, a dedicated experimenter with a positive genius for simple solutions to baffling problems, a "one-man freakshow"? The author never explains, and it's not obvious to the reader. The author's dismissive analysis of the innovations of the Wright Flyer minimizes its advantages and inflates its idiosyncrasies beyond any sense of scale — and for what purpose? His frivolous distortion of fact does nothing to enhance his point.

Theodores 13y ago

On a bicycle the left hand pedal screws in one way and the right hand pedal screws in the other way. To anyone that has noticed it the reason is obvious - you don't want the pedals to fall out or work free over time, therefore it is common sense that the threads are different on each side. However, there was a time before 1900 when you did not have a left-hand thread on one of the two pedals on a bicycle. You probably didn't have bearings in the pedal either and the pedals really could fall out on the one side. It took the Wright Brothers to see this problem and come up with the solution of using the left-hand thread. Back then there were two patent offices in the U.S., one for bicycles and one for everything else. The Wright Brothers were awarded the patent even though the left hand thread was far from a new innovation, it was the application of that innovation that was what they could patent. This really was a must have feature for bicycles but history has this 'invention' as an interesting footnote to the Wright Brothers story, there are no generally known details as to how they were able to profit from it, which presumably they were able to do to some extent. There is also another Wright Bros. patent that comes before that. This is for some self-oiling hub. Nowadays bicycle hubs are packed with grease and the last thing you want to do is to oil them. However, once upon a time, oil was what you used to lubricate bearings, and still was the case with 3-speed 'Sturmey Archer' hub gears up until the 1970's. The Wright Brothers innovation was to use some bits of felt as seals, this prevented the oil running out when the bicycle was parked on its side. At that time there were literally hundreds and hundreds of variations on the humble bicycle hub, plus what we know today as a ball bearing had actually only been invented thirty years before hand. No thread sizes were standard so this small bit of engineering was more like home computers before the IBM PC - nothing compatible and all very new. Much like how the million and one different home computer variants that existed during the 1980's died a death as soon as the IBM PC (and clones) took over, a similar thing happened with bicycles back in the early 1900's. Parts became standardised, bicycles became mass produced and 'craft' manufacturers such as the Wright Bros. could not compete on price. It all happened very quickly, within a short space of time everything ended up being a variant of the Rover Safety Bicycle with Dunlop tyres. By the time of the 'Patent Wars' the Wright Brothers were quite experienced at applying and getting patents. I suspect that there is a lot more to the Wright Brothers history that needs to be understood, far beyond the potted back-story I mention here. It is also difficult for us to appreciate their inventions, because they are laid out before us. For instance the left-hand thread, the physics going on there are beyond 'well it could work free if the bearings seized', there is this concept of precession that needed some deep knowledge to understand. Similarly with the patent for controlling the plane, the Wright Brothers understood flight at a deeper level and I think they thought there patents should reflect that knowledge and disregard 'workarounds' such as what Curtiss came up with.

cfontes 13y ago

Interesting write up about Writght brothers and Santos Dumont. http://www.cnet.com/news/were-the-wright-brothers-really-first-not-in-brazil/ http://www.cnet.com/news/were-the-wright-brothers-really-fir... Disclaimer: I am Brazilian and I learned that Santos Dumont was the first one when I was little in school. I just find it interesting and wanted to share, No sides or flame wars. He was Brazil's Leonardo Da Vinci I guess.

lotharbot 13y ago
Likewise, Richard Pearse of New Zealand is sometimes considered the first. He was able to get airborne in early 1903, but not really able to maneuver. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse It's also worth reading about Sir George Cayley, Samuel Pierpont Langley, and Gustave Whitehead -- all aviation pioneers with some degree of success in the pre-Wright era. One of the main accomplishments of the Wright Brothers was that they continued to improve on those flights over the next several years, putting flight in the public eye -- their flights in 1908 and 1909 catapulted flight from "something a few people have claimed, but there's still a lot of skepticism" to "something everyone realized was really possible".

hyp0 13y ago

Their pop-over "you've read 5 of your 10 free articles this month" made me want to read the article more thoroughly, to make sure I didn't waste the resource/gift, thus increasing my engagement. It's valuable. Seems like an effective enhancement to freemium. The most sincere best advertising: the thing itself. And if it's not free, how will people know it's great? How will they develop a taste for it if they've never tasted it?

rpgmaker 13y ago
It's just a bullshit limit that gets in the way of my reading. More times than not I have _not_ read an article just because it's not worth the extra effort. I know the NYT doesn't care about losing my eyeball in that instance just as I don't care enough about the article to go the extra mile. It works for both of us.

lotsofmangos 13y ago

“That is, of course, the irony of the patent system. Without patent protection, a competitor can simply replicate an invention and undercut the inventor’s price — which necessarily includes all the time and expense of research and development — so the incentive to experiment and create is severely inhibited. But if innovators such as Glenn Curtiss cannot build on the progress of others without paying exorbitantly for the privilege, the incentive to continue to experiment and create is similarly inhibited.” I read this and wondered if the patent system could be reformed to have a standardised rate for all licensees, similar to what is attempted with FRAND patents, but enforced with teeth across all of them.

hyp0 13y ago

It's so sad, because the Wright Brothers really were innovative. Not just the control system of planes, but the system of discovering that: they realized that building and testing a whole aircraft was too time consuming (not to mention risky), so they made a wind tunnel, and ran years of tests on models. The first successful man-powered aircraft (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossamer_Condor http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossamer_Condor) also found ways to iterate more quickly. But, as a creator, I can really empathise with Wilbur Wright's feeling, tragic and short-sighted though it is: they thought of it; they put all their blood, sweat and tears into it, for years and years; they were the first to climb this mountain; therefore, it's their's. Though it seems more artistic ego than "greed" to me.

hammadfauz 13y ago

I just got an insight upon reading this. Patents stand to incentivize the research and development, the failures that precede innovations. On the other hand, they hinder research and development that builds on existing technology. A good middle-ground would be patents being applicable only on rights to create _products_ based on a technology. Rights for any products based on a derivative patent belong solely to that patent, with nothing going towards the 'parent' patent. This encourages the incremental innovation, as well as pushing the original inventor to continue to improve on their own patent. For example, let's imagine someone patented a glass bottle as a container for ketchup. Any glass ketchup bottle makers pay that person. A person examines that glass bottle, observes that breakage of glass is a problem, and patents a plastic ketchup bottle. All plastic bottle makers buy their rights from this person. Glass bottle makers (if any) continue to pay the original patent owner for their rights. The glass bottle person, improves upon the plastic bottle, and gets a patent for a squeezable plastic ketchup bottle...You get the idea. Discuss.