
The Wright Brothers: Pioneers of Patent Trolling - MrXOR
https://time.com/4143574/wright-brothers-patent-trolling/
======
vanderZwan
Edison and the light bulb are another good example. The reason Philips became
so big was because the Netherlands had no patent law for half a century and
they just copied everyone else's innovations, something the company tries to
hide nowadays since they're in the business of patent trolling themselves.
Many of the people Edison put out of business through patent trolling decided
to work for Philips. Soon the Dutch light bulbs were better and cheaper than
anyone else's.

EDIT: In fact, the light bulbs became so reliable that light bulb
manifacturers decided to design _worse_ light bulbs for the sake of profit,
creating the first known example of a cartel specifically formed with planned
obsolescence in mind[0]. But that's another story.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel)

~~~
jacquesm
Ditto Lego.

~~~
jjtheblunt
Lego is not from Holland, rather from Denmark, so why "ditto"?

~~~
jacquesm
Because they took someone else's design, and then sued everybody that tried to
use 'their' design. They attempted to at least put a legal figleaf on this by
acquiring that company for a pittance many years later.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Fisher_Page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Fisher_Page)

LEGO should really acknowledge that what they did was wrong.

~~~
jjtheblunt
Thank you: had not known of this.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
It was a blatant and extreme rip off of someone else's work too. They copied
every single detail of branding, marketing, packaging and product:

[http://hilarypagetoys.com/Images/articlestock/article875_Ima...](http://hilarypagetoys.com/Images/articlestock/article875_Image_Lego%20copies%20of%20Kiddicraft%20Elements.jpg)

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rayiner
This article is kind of pop science history. Here is the Wright Patent:
[https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/1c/17/b5/e1f4968...](https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/1c/17/b5/e1f4968143a568/US821393.pdf)

The patent disclosed the theory of using ailerons for control. Claim 1 refers
to “lateral marginal portions” of the wing “capable of movement to different
positions above and below the normal plane of the airplane.” That’s an
aileron.

The embodiment in the patent happened to use a warping wing, but as a matter
of physics and the patent drafting, the invention was using such lateral
movable surfaces for control, not a particular way of building such a surface.

Additionally, the article fails to note the importance of patents to the other
side. The Arial Experimental Association was bankrolled by Alexander Graham
Bell. Bell had relied heavily on patents to secure investor capital that he
used to build his business and eventually his research lab. See:
[http://digitalcommons.law.utulsa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...](http://digitalcommons.law.utulsa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2980&context=tlr).
(The same is true, incidentally, for Edison.)

One of the fictions we indulge is that invention is all about inventors. In
fact, it’s at least as much about investors. The aviation patent wars is much
easier to understand if you look at the business and investment structures
that created American airplane companies in the first place:
[https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=4210000891220850...](https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=421000089122085071066090119088101031057007068045058024089023089126083022086084026010033060122005052003049115064016001092111080112008078077085086091028096070076110124000078053121076086112119117005002090122065071065068100100014015089109123090103092116114&EXT=pdf)

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dboreham
I had that penny dropping epiphany years ago, and it's great to see it
repeated here: patents are for the investor class who are accustomed to
dealing with pieces of paper that represent value: stocks, bonds, mortgages,
warrants, copyright, trademarks. Patents are really an attempt to fit what we
do into their world of value-paper. The fact that there's a significant
impedance mismatch underlies all the problems with patents.

~~~
vanderZwan
That sounds interesting. Could you elaborate on that for those of us who might
get lost in the terse jargon there?

~~~
dboreham
Hmm...not sure how to expand on what I said. Perhaps an example will help:

If you go to a bank asking to borrow money they might ask "what collateral do
you have to secure a loan?". If you own a house, they would ask you to bring
in the property title document to prove to them that you own it (or some title
company would do that work for them).

Patents can serve a similar purpose: you want to borrow money from an investor
to develop a product idea into a commercial product: they might say "what
patents do you have?". To them, the patent document serves a similar purpose
to the property title in the bank loan case: a piece of paper that makes them
think there's something of value that they can ultimately take from you or
sell if the company doesn't succeed, or at least something that gives them a
warmer and fuzzier feeling that if you were just saying "Trust me I know what
I'm doing".

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WalterBright
The difference is the Wright Brothers actually did invent controlled flight.
They did not buy or file some obvious patent.

The aileron is a clear derivative of wing-warping. It's just using a hinge
instead of bending the structure. While the Wrights did abuse their position
to wage an ugly patent war, they were not patent trolls.

~~~
rahuldottech
Uh, yeah they were:

> _They also proved themselves pioneers of what’s sometimes known as patent
> trolling: the controversial modern practice of suing competitors for
> infringements that fall beyond the scope of one’s patent._

~~~
DuskStar
That's not how I'd define patent trolling, honestly. I'd include some
restrictions on the patent itself, and how novel it was.

What the Wright brothers did was like planting a tree and then claiming that
the fully grown tree came from what they did. Patent trolling is like adding a
leaf to an existing tree and then claiming the entire branch it's sitting on.

~~~
J-Kuhn
The definition of a patent troll is hard. While your definition is currently
the common definition, I believe we have to look how we reached that
definition.

The first question we have to ask is: How do we not like patents to be used?

> its impact on the state of American aviation was indisputably negative.

We don't want patents to be used in a way that deters further research and
advancements in that field.

Can we determine if a way of use will do that in the future? Unfortunately, as
we can't see into the future, we don't know.

So we use the next best thing: We try to find patterns that strongly suggest
that someone is abusing a patent.

And the pattern that we found is: People who just buy patents (sometimes for
just $1) and don't produce their own are more likely to abuse patents. And
that's how we came to today's definition.

But for the past, we can answer the second question. And we should use this as
definition if possible.

~~~
sokoloff
It’s rare for a patent (or airplane) to change hands for literally $1.

It’s common for them to change hands for “$1 plus other valuable
consideration” to mask the true price. Sometimes that “OVC” might be 999,999
other dollars for example.

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vallismortis
I've never seen the Wright brothers beaten up like this. One brother died
trying to improve their invention, and the other died in extreme poverty in a
small apartment after suffering from a car accident for years. He had received
tons of awards from the industry, but those were meaningless to him. He was
more interested in documenting the history of his brother's contributions. The
general vibe of this thread is incredible to me.

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Amygaz
I am not a fan of patents, mainly because of issues surrounding eligibility,
implementation and abuses. (edit: which would be all fairly straight forward
to re-adjust and enforce, if there was a will to do so in the legislature)

I do, however, reserve the term "patent troll" to places who practice
acquiring patents and suing others based on those patents, as a way to make
money, but don't actually build anything with those patents. I do not
understand why it is even legal to do that, that is most certainly easy to fix
(edit: I reached a point where I think greedy people = psychopaths, destroyers
of the world).

So the Wright Brothers, the Edison, the Christiansen, and many others,
actually did build from their invention. They did use their patent to prevent
others from using it, which is basically what a patent grants its owner.
Patents don't give you the right to proceed with your invention, they give you
the right from excluding others from doing your invention.

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jb775
> _the Wright brothers waged a prolonged, embarrassing and largely
> unsuccessful battle against other early aviators over who owned the
> aeronautical principles that made flight possible_

Whose to say this wasn't at least partially the reason the Wright brothers are
cemented in history? I'd argue that their names being attached to so much
litigation strengthened the "Wright Brothers invented flight" association in
the minds of historians (which may have even been their actual end-goal with
all this).

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exergy
Obligatory further reading on this subject is Maciej's blogpost [1]

[1]
[https://idlewords.com/2003/12/100_years_of_turbulence.htm](https://idlewords.com/2003/12/100_years_of_turbulence.htm)

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lordvon
I am saddened by seeing such a flippant characterization. Patent troll is
literally defined to be "a company that obtains the rights to one or more
patents in order to profit by means of licensing or litigation, rather than by
producing its own goods or services.".

Inventing a successful aircraft at the time required getting many things right
at once, which they tackled one at a time over several years. They invented
the modern wind tunnel. They were the first to systematically test and
accurately measure lift-to-drag ratios for a variety of airfoil shapes. They
built an aluminum engine from scratch (the first use of aluminum in aircraft),
to deal with the lack of engines with sufficient power-to-weight ratios. They
don't get much credit for this, but they invented modern propeller theory!!!
They were the first to realize the importance of control, when most others
prioritized power. They invented the first viable aerodynamic control scheme.
There might be even more I am omitting, but know that they did this all on
their own. In fact, they were offered financial support from Octave Chanute,
but refused, as they did not want to be tempted to quit their successful
bicycle business. Even Samuel Langley, a highly reputed, generously-funded,
government-backed contemporary, failed. Flight was a really hard problem that
required getting many things right at once.

What's more, they shared their early successes and discoveries with an un-
powered glider with others at an aeronautical conference that Octave Chanute
invited them to speak at. It seems no one actively attempting to build flying
machines took advantage of their discoveries, because they did not realize
what was at the heart of the problem (controls), which is just one of the
reasons (but a big one) of why the Wright brothers succeeded first.

A lot of people do not realize that although their first flight was in 1903,
most did not know flight had been achieved until several years later. Of
course, the Wright brothers' claims and some pictures were made public, but
people did not believe, and even accused them of being frauds. Especially in
France, where nationalistic pride in being leaders in aeronautics was high. By
1908, some French aviators (e.g. Santos Dumont, Henry Farman) had achieved
simple flights maybe similar or even slightly better than what the Wright
brothers had achieved in 1903. But by then, the Wright brothers had far
advanced from their 1903 machine. In 1908, in Le Mans, France, Wilbur Wright
made the first public demonstration of their flying machine, staying in the
air far longer than anyone else, and performing acrobatics never before seen.
It was stunning and utterly sensational in global press, and all accusing the
Wrights of being frauds (essentially all prominent French aviators)
immediately retracted their accusations, and admitted that the Wrights were in
fact the first to fly in 1903.

The point of the previous paragraph is to say that before the Wrights' public
demonstrations, flying machines were not practical. After the Wrights' public
demonstrations, although they made and continued to hold world records for
some time, machines made by others improved rapidly. The Wrights were at the
very least hugely influential to all aviators. I recommend the highly
entertaining and informative biography on the Wright brothers written by David
McCullough. I really think it could make for an excellent modern biopic!

Edit: more to the point, as rayiner points out in his comment, ailerons were
actually covered in the Wrights' original patent.

~~~
abraCadabstrax
A small point to your otherwise interesting post. Santos Dumont was, in fact,
not French, but rather a Brazilian living in France.

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noonespecial
They invented, built and sold aircraft. They're not trolls. Perhaps they
pursued patent enforcement to the point of abuse, but that's a different
animal than sitting in a lawyer shop doing nothing but rent-seeking human
progress.

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egdod
> patent trolling: the controversial modern practice of suing competitors for
> infringements that fall beyond the scope of one’s patent

Who writes this stuff?

