Do Patent Laws Really Protect Small Inventors? 267
whoever57 writes "Patent trolls like to claim that patent laws provide a way that small inventors can create products and benefit financially from their invention. One such inventor faces selling his house, despite inventing a product that has sold tens of millions worldwide. From the article: 'Inventor Trevor Baylis says he faces having to sell his house after failing to make money from his wind up radio and is now calling for the government to step into to protect inventors. “I’ve got someone coming around in the next couple of weeks to do a valuation on my house,” says Trevor Baylis, as he walks into the sitting room of his home on Eel Pie Island, in Twickenham, south-west London. “I’m going to have to sell it or remortgage it – I’m totally broke. I’m living in poverty here.”'"
Short answer. (Score:3, Interesting)
No.
I'm not trying to be sarcastic, but under current U.S. law, it's nearly financially prohibitive to defend against a claim.
At this first to file is utter nonsense, too. Very bad. Let's throw out prior art.
Not entirely related, but in the early 80's I was acquainted with author. He was approached by Disney to turn one of his
books into a movie - paid him cash-money up front, too. Well, he's thinking 1-2 years... Still haven't seen the movie.
There are companies stockpiling ideas out there like Real Estate - except'n they really ain't real. That's were the
current suite of laws have led us - to this incredible stagnation. Oh, it'll take some time before the wheels finally grind
to a halt, but they will....
CAPTCHA = locust - there's never just one...
Patents are not a license to print money (Score:5, Interesting)
A patent is not a substitute for a viable business model. One cannot simply receive a patent and wait for the money to roll in, especially not as technology changes around you, quite often in order to work around your patent.
In this case, in 1991 Baylis invented a generator that was based on storing energy in a spring, then using a system of gears to release that energy steadily to power various devices such as a radio. But by 1995 wind-up radios were on their way out and by 2000 they had been entirely replaced by battery-based radios. His invention was a flash in the pan.
So Baylis had a nice idea, made some decent money off of it, but failed to turn that into a sustainable career. Now he wants the entire UK patent system modified in order to rescue him from his misfortune.
Re:Wrong Premise, Approach from a Different Angle (Score:4, Interesting)
Not quite. His invention was storing the energy from the wind up in an efficient spring design. It was not the wind-up part itself. The manufacturer changed it to a battery system and cut him out. That is it. Even under his proposed solutions, which include a novelty requirement and much longer terms to patents, he wouldn't be covered. This is because his improvement was from cruddy batteries to a clockwork type spring system; their improvement was from clockwork type spring system to modern batteries. So, for him to win, you need to argue that the switch from battery to spring was a novel change, such that it is a completely different product, but the change from spring back to battery was not, such that it is a completely different product. I don't see how a rational person could say that one is and the other isn't.
Re:Of course it protects the small investor (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know whether there was any really nasty interpersonal knife-twisting and violatation-of-not-actually-contracts-but-verbally-they-felt-like-them in that specific case(which my account for some of the bitterness swirling around it; but I certainly wouldn't want to be 'guy with a clever mechanical power-smoothing technique' in a world where supercaps have become downright cheap, and the demands of digital electronics of various flavors have driven serious improvements in DC-DC conversion and various techniques for bludgeoning ill-mannered input power into nice clean low-voltage DC...
The question that I'm left with is whether the spring arrangement was simply too expensive in absolute terms(ie, even if the 'intellectual property' were valued at zero, is the BOM cost of the spring +simpler electronics just higher than dumb crank + more sophisticated power conditioning apparatus) or whether this is a case where the patent holder, by holding out for more than he was worth, encouraged people to 'innovate around' the patent.
Hero (Score:2, Interesting)
Trevor Bayliss is considered something of a British hero for his inventions. He gets wheeled out on TV whenever they want to portray the classic eccentric British inventor (and whenever James Dyson is too busy). The fact that he's broke will surprise a lot of people.
But to be honest, he shouldn't be this position -- he has sufficient public image that he ought to be able to make a living on the public speaking circuits. Okay, so he wouldn't get the kind of money from it that Tony Blair is raking in, but he ought to be able to keep the wolves from the door. (for 'wolves', read 'estate agents')
Re:My family's Experience (Score:2, Interesting)
May sound fake but I guarantee it is REAL.
My Great Uncle ended up living on Social Security. His process involved using "soaps"
To his credit ~Was THE FIRST HUMAN to scientifically discover the toxicity of plutonium. He was the lab guy, on the Manhattan project who fed Plutonium to lab rats on the order of a few parts per billion. The next day the lab rats were dead, so he then fed the dead rats to the beetles, as they would leave they bones intact so they can study how much of the heavy metal reached to bones. The Following day the beetles were dead. and he was quickly shuffled off to another lab there in Rochester.
Oh here are some of his later patent #'s 4679627 , 4648449, before he retired. at least 2 of them. He even was THE person who created teh oil eating bacteria, How? he used a high potency UV light to scramble bacteria DNA, and observed the effects. He was the first person to deliberately alter the DNA for scientific purposes and file a patent
Re:Of course it protects the small investor (Score:4, Interesting)
"If you work in a big company (i.e. an employee), it is not your patent."
That is by no means a given in the U.S. It depends on many factors. The only time it is automatic (and not even all of those times), is if it came from work you do for the company, in the normal course of your duties as an employee, for pay, and there are no other agreements.
If it is something you did on your own time, it only belongs to the company if you have a specific agreement saying that any inventions you create while in the employ of Company X belong to Company X. (Such agreements do exist, though I would never sign one. My father got screwed over by one of those. He threw his own time and expertise into inventing a tool that is now in common use, but the company got the patent rights because he had signed that sort of agreement.)
Otherwise, if it is something you did on your own time, it is yours. But you might have to prove it in order to keep it.
Re:Of course it protects the small investor (Score:4, Interesting)
"... and violatation-of-not-actually-contracts-but-verbally-they-felt-like-them in that specific case..."
Here is a little bit of Contract Law 101:
If you agreed to something in good-faith negotiation, and there is "consideration" on both sides, and it doesn't otherwise violate law, then it's a contract. It doesn't have to be on paper. That piece of paper is nothing more than evidence of your contract; it is not, in itself, the contract. (Though it must be said that it can be pretty powerful evidence.)
Re:Of course it protects the small investor (Score:1, Interesting)
And then you have companies that do not know what they have on their hands and let the employee keep it.
Woz lucked out on that, in a sense, when creating what became the Apple 1 while working for HP.
Re:Of course it protects the small investor (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok. So someone invented this thing called a virtual shopping cart. Another company "tweaked" the code slightly and had a shopping cart themselves. This sounds familiar. So which is right? You can tweak it? You can't Tweak it? How much Tweaking is a new design?
I think I read about this on /. actually. I think some people might have even said the person claiming to have the original idea was a patent troll? I'm not saying which side is right. I don't know if I have an answer honestly. But you have to think, isn't the exact same argument?