The Man Who Created the Pencil Eraser and How Patents Have Changed 234
fermion writes "This weeks 'Who Made That' column in The New York Times concerns the built in pencil eraser. In 1858 Hymen Lipman put a rubber plug into the wood shaft of a pencil. An investor then paid about 2 million in today's dollars for the patent. This investor might have become very rich had the supreme court not ruled that all Lipmen had done was put together two known technologies, so the patent was not valid. The question is where has this need for patents to be innovative gone? After all there is the Amazon one-click patent which, after revision, has been upheld. Microsoft Activesync technology patent seems to simply patent copying information from one place to another. In this modern day do patents promote innovation, or simply protect firms from competition?"
Skewed perspective (Score:5, Informative)
Oh where do I begin to describe the skewed perspective of this article. It seems clear the author had recently read the book "The Pencil" and thought they could write up a little tidbit about it with patents. But, when you start doing the math, it really falls through. The "invention" was created in 1858. The supreme court ruling about the patent came in 1875, nearly 20 years later (so at the point where the patent would have nearly expired anyways). Meanwhile, it's not really at all clear that the whole eraser-on-pencil really took off on its own. It sounds like, instead, some American companies liked the idea (perhaps to match parity with said investor, Joseph Reckendorfer) and started producing such pencils. Meanwhile, some 60+ years later and Europe still wasn't making such pencils (well, not commonly enough, anyways).
Oh, and the best part is the silly:
Or it could be that, oh, Europeans were still using their separate erasers and perhaps snarkily mocking the Americans for throwing away tons of perfectly good erasers just for the convenience of having one glued to the end of their pencil. Meanwhile, the more honest truth is probably the more simple that European pencil manufacturers probably didn't think there much demand and the vast majority of people weren't going to pay a premium to import the stupid things In the end, wide scale adoption would have more to do with there being only a few manufacturers which made up the effective industry in the area and with a majority all deciding something, whatever it was, was a good enough idea and offering the X + Y product as either a replacement for X or as a premium version of X, wide side adoption basically inherently happened. But even today, plenty of places sell pencils without erasers. And there's separate eraser heads you can pull off and reuse until they're heavily wore out (although those are still mighty wasteful as usually the base is pretty unusable for erasing.
So, now with that, I can happily say my comment is about as much a rambling little conjecture as the article.
Re:You know where it went.. (Score:2, Informative)
You are incredibly wrong. Yes, the patent office makes a lot of money from fees. But that money is controlled by Congress, not the Patent Office. The patent office doesn't get all that money. Which is actually part of the problem. There are not enough examiners, causing huge backlogs. That's why patents get rubber stamped.
But even that isn't the real problem. The real problem is the Federal Circuit, which was created specifically to handle patent appeals. The original idea was that the court would be staffed by judges that were experts in patent law. That hasn't turned out to be the case. Few of the judges have had any experience in patent law before joining the court. The Fed Circuit has made big changes in patent law over the past few decades. Fortunately, over the past ten years, the US Supreme Court has been putting the smack down on the Fed Circuit in cases such as Bilski.
Re:Independence of the courts ? (Score:5, Informative)
"Today, the courts have become an apparatchik for the corporations, the banksters, the politicians, and the power that be."
"Judges back then were chosen based on merits. Judges today are chosen based on who they know."
Are you kidding me? Cronyism was way worse in the 19th century. And if you think corporations wield power now, then you'd crap your pants if you read any in-depth history of the gilded age.
Patent lawyers know exactly what changed between then and now: the movement of all judicial patent appeals to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The court effectively specializes in a small number of cases, and has taken up the cause of making patent rights more robust. The chief judge of this court has actually written the book on patent law, and he's about as pro-patent as you can possibly get. This is conservative judicial activism at it's absolute finest.
FWIW, there have been two ebbs in American patent law. The middle of the 19th century and the middle of 20th century were when patent rights were at their weakest. The highest point before the modern era was roughly around the time of the New Deal, when courts slowly became more deferential to Congress because of the turbulent times. This was when agricultural patents (e.g. on seeds and cultivars) came into force (i.e. Plant Patent Act of 1930).
But the power of patents today is simply beyond all comprehension. The run up began in the 1970s, but didn't really get moving until the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was created.
Re:Independence of the courts ? (Score:3, Informative)
actually, at the time, pretty nearly everyone was doing exactly that and had been doing it for years because they just didn't give a shit that it was a bad idea. after all, "we'll never get hacked".
It sounds like you don't understand what OneClick is. Not only was it not common then, it's not common now. Storing the credit card number is only part of it. Other than Amazon, the only site I'm aware of that does it is Apple's iTunes Store, and Apple licensed the patent from Amazon.
Re:Independence of the courts ? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, I don't see why that is relevant since a pencil with a built in eraser did do something new - it erased out of the box which apparently was new for pencils at the time.
Yes but it was pretty standard for erasers to erase right out of the box.
This is about the most straight forward example of just combining 2 existing inventions. We all know that pencils can do things that erasers can't, and that erasers can do things that pencils can't, and that a pencil with an eraser attached can do both things.
This same property holds for any 2 inventions glued together. TO use Jane Q Public's example of a can opener welded to a crowbar, I can say the same thing. Before this new invention, crow bars could not open cans out of the box. So what? Can openers could open cans out of the box.
I think a more important question to ask is the following: What does society gain by allowing these types of "inventions" to receive a government sanctioned monopoly? The normal deal is that the monopoly provides an incentive to the inventor that he wouldn't otherwise have. I am 100% sure that someone else would have been willing to dedicate the time and effort into research and development to put an eraser on a pencil even without the prospect of a monopoly.
We should only be offering the monopoly when it is unlikely that an inventor would be willing to spend the time an effort to create the invention without it, as in the case with inventions that have very high research and development costs. All other patents actual stifle innovation rather than spur it.
Re:Independence of the courts ? (Score:5, Informative)
Of course it's not common now, it's fucking patented!