
Super Soaker creator awarded $72.9M from Hasbro - shill
http://www.ajc.com/news/business/super-soaker-creator-awarded-729m-from-hasbro/nbjmm/#!
======
rdw
What's interesting to me about this story in light of current events is that
Johnson Research and Development Co., seems in many ways like an NPE. He
doesn't make products directly, he simply licenses the patents to other
companies that do make the products, and sometimes sues them.

Obviously, he's not a patent troll, but what's the bright line between what he
does and what a patent troll does? This is a critical question in the patent
troll discussion, because it is absolutely the case that every Intellectual
Ventures, Lodsys, and Rockstar thinks of themselves as being innovative
inventors like Lonnie Johnson. They'll hold independent inventors like him up
whenever legislation is proposed and say that it'll hurt good old-fashioned
American invention, and maybe they'll even be right.

It's critical that there be a clear division there, or else reform will never
go through, or worse, end up hurting actual inventors. How can that line be
drawn?

~~~
noonespecial
He invented a real (specific) product with prototypes and everything, licensed
that product to a real manufacturer who then made it, gained lots of money,
and then stiffed him on the payment they promised.

Trolls would have produced no toy at all, for anyone, kept the whole process a
secret, and then sued every child who ever flung water at another at a
birthday party.

"Its the difference between using a feather and using a chicken." You know it
when you see it.

Edit: Just for clarity, its the direction the arrow points. Lonnie Johnson
created a product and then went out and sought a company to _start_ producing
it. Trolls do it backwards, they go out and find companies that are _already_
producing it and then threaten them with forcing them to _stop_.

~~~
mikeash
What about the hypothetical scenario where Hasbro tells him to get lost, then
rips off his design and produces the stuff anyway?

As far as I can tell, this scenario is _very_ difficult to distinguish from a
patent troll. The only real differentiator is whether or not the patent is
actually a novel invention or whether it's just the "click a button on the
internet" kind of crap that so many of these things end up being.

~~~
gaadd33
Don't most patent trolls purchase or license the patents they are suing with
as opposed to actually filing them? That seems like a pretty big distinction.

~~~
roel_v
If this Lonnie guy would sell his patents to somebody else, and they would sue
Hasbro, would that make them 'patent trolls' then?

Or what about if he dies and his children sue Hasbro? Does that make them
'patent trolls'?

------
meritt
HN should start having a "hacker of the week" or something, notable people to
admire and inspire. We could start with Lonnie Johnson.

~~~
fit2rule
I was just about to suggest an AMA with him, but then I realized .. HN doesn't
do that. Or does it? (Haven't noticed)

Either way, Mr. Johnson certainly appears to be the kind of engineer a lot of
people aspire to be .. On one end of the spectrum, a kids toy. On the other
end of the spectrum: multiple successful space probes. Yikes! The guys kicks
ass!

~~~
sillysaurus2
HN goes about AMAs by getting them to post here. Then people ask them random
questions whenever they want. There's no focused idea of an AMA. I think
because there's very little celebrity worship on HN compared to other sites.
People here tend to look at others' accomplishments and say, "I can do that."

~~~
fit2rule
> I think because there's very little celebrity worship on HN compared to
> other sites.

Glad you added the qualifier "compared to other sites" there .. because I see
a lot of hero worship on HN. (Steve Jobs, Paul Graham, &etc.) However it seems
to be a lot less robotic.

I hope we can one day get Mr. Johnson to answer a few questions - I agree with
other commenters that he is indeed an inspiration and it'd be great for my
kids to know more about him. Oops, there I go, creating a hero to worship ..
;)

~~~
mbell
I find that HN has a slightly different version of worship. Posts by some
folks such as PG get auto-voted to the top, but at the same time quite often
the replies to the post are far different than on other sites. To use PG as an
example I've often found that replies to his posts that make it to the top are
well thought out disagreements/counterpoints which instigates further
discussion. On the other hand, disagreeing with an AMA response on reddit gets
you downvoted into oblivion unless the reddit hive mind already hates the
AMAer.

~~~
zevyoura
> Posts by some folks such as PG get auto-voted to the top

My understanding of HN's sorting is that it takes into account the average
karma of a poster's past comments and includes that in the weighting. Given
that, it's not surprising that pg and others are always at the top (and it's a
bit of a self-perpetuating system for power users).

~~~
fit2rule
Yes, this self-perpetuation of platforms for power users business does indeed
create 'meritocracy and value' of the readers attention and time. But then
again, in many cases, it does not. When I broach the subject personally, I
feel that HN works for me because it seems to promote more for 'the idea of
the successful action/techno hero' rather than any particular individual, but
then again all Internet forums promote the Archetype that they attract. Which
is to say that any particular word, itself, that we put out there on the
Internet, eventually collates with other 'words', 'subjects', 'forms', and so
on .. forming what we have. Perhaps I am responding more the language of the
hero in the HN/reddit zeitgeist, also, the banal.

------
reneherse
Ha, awesome to know that the Super Soaker came from such a brilliant inventor
and businessman! Lots of good memories with those things...

As a kid I hacked my own extra powerful version using a bicycle frame pump,
soda bottles, pvc pipe, copper tubing and brass valves, and ruled the
neighborhood "battlefield" for a summer :)

------
danso
I'm sure much has been written about the inventor, Lonnie Johnson, already,
but if he were a young kid today -- or, perhaps, had more coverage for
inventing a billion dollar toy -- he'd be as revered as Elon Musk by HN, for
being both a rich entrepreneur and an esteemed hacker. From the OP:

> _Johnson, a nuclear engineer, Tuskegee University Ph.D. and former NASA
> scientist, founded his company in 1989. It was the same year he first
> licensed the Super Soaker, which generated more than $200 million in retail
> sales two years later, the company said. The toy was licensed to Larami
> Corp., which was later purchased by Hasbro._

> _Johnson holds more than 80 patents, with more than 20 pending, the company
> said, which said sales of the Super Soaker have approached nearly $1
> billion._

> _As an Alabama high school senior, Johnson finished building a remote-
> controlled robot with a reel-to-reel tape player for a brain and jukebox
> solenoids controlling its pneumatic limbs, according to a 2008 profile in
> the Atlanta Journal Constitution._

edit: This 2001 NYT profile is even more fascinating:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/31/science/engineer-at-
play-l...](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/31/science/engineer-at-play-lonnie-
johnson-rocket-science-served-up-soggy.html?pagewanted=all)

> _In the late 1970 's, he worked at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory in
> Albuquerque, overseeing the safety of projects involving space nuclear
> power._

> _In 1979, he moved to California and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, an
> aerospace mecca._

> _There his nuclear skills helped integrate an atomic power plant into
> Galileo, a $1.6 billion spacecraft destined to study Jupiter and its 16
> moons. It needed an atomic battery because sunlight would be too weak there
> to power solar panels._

> _David M. Durham, a spacecraft engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
> recalled that Mr. Johnson was known not only for professional excellence but
> for testing his wife 's patience with his moonlighting._

> _' 'At one point, his wife nearly threw him out of the house because all he
> did was tinker,'' he said. After minor successes with inventions, he added,
> Mr. Johnson finally ''came up with one that allowed him to no longer have to
> work for anybody.''_

> _It happened in 1982 while Mr. Johnson was working at home on a new kind of
> cooling device. At that time, refrigerators often used Freon, a gas that
> destroys the earth 's ozone layer. He envisioned one that ran on water. It
> would not only be efficient but would also be environmentally friendly._

~~~
sitkack
I learned about Lonnie when I read his patent on the super soaker. Huge
respect.

~~~
KevinEldon
Patent #5,074,437. Can be found here: [http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5074437.PN.&OS=PN/5074437&RS=PN/5074437)

------
kanamekun
Was curious how the Super Soaker worked, and came across this great summary
from How Stuff Works:

[http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/water-
blaster3.htm](http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/water-blaster3.htm)
[http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/water-
blaster4.htm](http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/water-blaster4.htm)

~~~
warmwaffles
As a kid, I knew what the back tank did just based on observation. I am so
glad I learned that I knew about 50% of how it actually worked. TIL this was a
great simple design.

------
URSpider94
It's very interesting that everyone appears to unanimously agree that Johnson
is not a patent troll, but it's hard to figure out exactly why.

People said it's because he made a legitimate product. From what I can see,
Johnson Research and Development Co. never shipped a single Super Soaker --
100% of their revenue is from licensing.

People said it's because he had a licensing agreement first. What if Larami
had refused to sign a licensing agreement with him in the first place, ripped
off his design, and he'd had to resort to a suit to get paid?

People said that it's because Hasbro explicitly used his design as a starting
point. What if they invented their own water guns after seeing his prototype
at a trade show, and then thumbed their nose at him? What if they
"independently" invented their own water gun without seeing his? If you're
telling me that there's a difference between these two cases, then you're
saying that the courts need to determine intent and foreknowledge. What if
someone from Hasbro was at the trade show where he exhibited, but just claimed
not to have seen his booth? What if he had approached Hasbro for a license,
and they claimed that their internal team was not aware of those discussions?

People said it's because he is the original inventor. What if he'd despaired
of ever beating Hasbro in court and licensed his patent to Acacia so that they
could go after Hasbro?

Finally, people are saying that the problem is that the inventions of patent
trolls are "obvious". Is putting a battery-powered pump in a water gun a non-
obvious invention worthy of patent protection? Batteries, pumps and water guns
all existed before this -- what's the innovation here?

~~~
ScottBurson
_Is putting a battery-powered pump in a water gun a non-obvious invention
worthy of patent protection? Batteries, pumps and water guns all existed
before this -- what 's the innovation here?_

This is an excellent question. Let me offer a possible answer.

It seems to me that the very fact that batteries, pumps, and water guns had
all existed for some time, and yet nobody until Johnson thought to put them
together, in itself constitutes evidence that the idea was nonobvious.

It seems to me that a lot of the problem patents we have seen in recent years
involve relatively new technologies. For example, once we had low-cost
scanners, and once file transmission by email became common, scan-to-email was
an obvious idea. But it wasn't _so_ obvious that one of the first people to
think of it (almost certainly not the very first) wasn't able to obtain a
patent on it. Therein, I think, lies the problem: when a new technology shows
up, the PTO simply has no way to know what applications of it count as obvious
-- it hasn't been around long enough for the obvious ones to have been thought
of already.

Under such circumstances the PTO should be very careful about granting
patents. I think a reasonable guideline would be that once a new technology
begins to be widely used, the PTO should assume that any idea that simply
combines the new technology with existing techniques, or applies it to well-
known problems in a straightforward way, is obvious. This would have ruled out
all the "X, but on the Internet" patents we have seen go by.

As I have written previously, a deeper problem with our system is this. A
patent is a trade: we give the inventor a time-limited monopoly in exchange
for disclosure of the invention. But there's no one unambiguously charged with
making sure we got a good deal: that the value of the disclosure outweighs the
cost of the monopoly. While this is technically the PTO's responsibility, its
management and incentive structures aren't set up with this goal paramount.
This pushes the problem to the courts; but the courts tend to defer to the
PTO's judgment. So really, there's nobody minding the store.

------
moocowduckquack
I hope it helps him build his JTEC thingy -
[http://www.parc.com/event/713/high-efficiency-solid-state-
en...](http://www.parc.com/event/713/high-efficiency-solid-state-engine.html)

------
bstar77
This story seems very similar to the universal wrench story here:
[http://abcnews.go.com/US/MadeInAmerica/wrench-inventor-
claim...](http://abcnews.go.com/US/MadeInAmerica/wrench-inventor-claims-sears-
stole-idea-china/story?id=17720122)

It seems to be a disturbing trend where large companies get into business
agreements with small time inventors, then do everything possible to screw
them out of royalties by creating cheap knock-off products with trivial
differences.

------
kamjam
_Johnson also wanted the court to force Hasbro to open its books to determine
sales of Super Soaker products from 2006 to 20012._

That's a lot of sales they're disputing :-p

------
pjmorris
I remember first seeing a Super Soaker in a Toys 'R Us sometime in 1991 (I
think), and thinking 'That's genius'. I'm glad to know the guy who made it
'got paid'.

------
siculars
Who do these corporate conglomerates think they are by trying to con inventors
from their due? This happens all too often. These corporations love to lord
their patents over everyone else but refuse to pay up when it is clear they
not only have a legal obligation, but a moral one as well.

Note, Robert Kearns,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns).

