

How Inventors Always Get Screwed - asciilifeform
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/10/greg_kinnear_in.html;jsessionid=PC1LCT4NAMYFSQSNDLPCKH0CJUNN2JVN

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jacquesm
Anecdotal evidence: I know an inventor that got screwed -> inventors always
get screwed.

It does not hold water, there are plenty of inventors that did really well
from their inventions, there are also quite a few that did not profit at all.
On the whole it is as with any other creative job, if you're not good in both
the business side and the creative side team up with somebody who is (it still
exposes you to the risk that they'll take your money).

The Armstrong story is quite sad by the way, he committed suicide because he
lost a patent fight he should have won.

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wallflower
> his tale of a true genius struggling against those out to steal the fruits
> of his brilliance.

"You cannot develop a reputation for somebody who gives up. You have to be
known as a fighter for your rights. Otherwise, you'll never license
anything...Even Thomas Edison had a tough time supporting and protecting his
patents. He spent about $1.4 million [to defend his inventions], and this was
around the turn of the century, when beer was a nickel." -Jerome Lemelson

Jerome Lemelson, who was arguably the most successful American inventor (in
terms of money received, not brilliance - some of his 600 patents are
questionable) in decades, was a patent-holder of many key patents relating to
magnetic recording. And stuff like the flexible track used by Mattel's
Matchbox cars.

He spent years in court suing the big players like Sony to pay him licensing
fees. He ultimately prevailed in many cases and now his foundation helps
support patent rights for inventors and helps bootstrap and reward promising
inventors.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_H._Lemelson>

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tokenadult
This generalizes to a principle that all law students ought to learn in law
school, or in their summer jobs during law school. A very typical form of new
business partnership is the "brains-money" partnership, in which one partner
provides the brilliant new business idea, and the other partner provides the
capital. What is typically found in such partnerships is that the partner with
the money controls the direction of the development of the partnership. That's
not really terribly surprising to anyone who has ever formed a start-up.

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CamperBob
The windshield-wiper story has always bothered me. I'm sorry, call me a
Communist or something, but nobody deserves $30 million for "inventing" an
intermittent windshield wiper. Can you imagine what it would do to our cost of
living, not to mention the progress of technology, if we had to reward
"inventors" across all market segments by that standard?

To me, the Kearns case was just an early example of an obvious patent that
would never have been granted by any examiner smart enough to fog a mirror.

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tokenadult
A contrary point of view would be that if the incremental improvement in
performance of a variable-speed wiper is worth one cent (or one dollar, or
whatever) over the performance of a constant-speed wiper for each driver on
the roadways of this country, it makes perfect economic sense for the pioneer
who brings about that improvement to enjoy a license fee that car
manufacturers pass on to each driver for the duration of a patent. Patents
don't last forever, but they are intended to be lucrative enough to get
someone out of the starting blocks to DO something about implementing a new
improvement.

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CamperBob
Here's one way to counter that argument: let's say you run a car manufacturer.
You don't happen to know about the Kearns patent, but one day while driving
home in an intermittent rainstorm, you find yourself wishing your wipers
didn't have to run continuously. When you get to work the next day you stop by
the engineering department and say "Hey, Joe, stick a 555 timer in that
windshield relay circuit, would you?"

Five years and several million cars later, Kearns jumps out of the bushes and
whacks you in the kneecap with a lawsuit. What should your penalty be? Do you
agree with the judge that you owe some guy $10,000,000 for a trivial idea that
he happened to have before you did?

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pj
See right here is the problem: in hindsight, you think the solution was easy.

 _[Kearns] first patent for the [intermittent wipers] was filed on December 1,
1964._ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns>

The 555 timer, however, _was designed and invented by Hans R. Camenzind ... in
1970 and introduced in 1971 by Signetics_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_timer_IC>

The 555 didn't _exist_ when he invented his wipers. What is your solution now?

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silentOpen
Without having read any docs or patents, I'd say some sort of bimetallic
strip: two metals, different resistances/heat expansion constants. It's how
they used to make turn signal timers.

