Yeah, enough already, no one is going to be influenced by this unless and until it affects them more directly than just everything being overpriced, or they get personally ripped off, as I have been.
I have (had) a few patents myself, mostly in the "vanity" category, and going way back.
First was a method for editable analog memory, that used conductive ink on velum, read out by rolling a WW resistor with insulation removed over it, and taking the signal off the ends of the "trace". Was used in the very first speech synthesizers and shown at the NY world's fair in the '60's. No one else really needed a hand-editable multichannel slow readout analog memory, and by the time anyone did, well, digital was there. It was pretty neat at the time, though.
2nd one I got ripped of on. It was a way to bandwidth-fold such that two speech lines and one TTY could go down a single phone line without interfering with one another. AT&T found a way around our claims, we didn't have a good enough lawyer -- after we turned down a flat $10k for it - we wanted royalties. Then it became moot because of advance in tech, of course. I never used to be cynical enough to work on making things so that wouldn't happen by effectively patenting the "idea" -- which with enough legal weaseling, you can still do even though it's not supposed to be possible. I'd say the patent on remembering your customer's billing information was one such (Amazon's one click patent). Not like there wasn't prior art there....going back to the invention of double entry bookkeeping or thereabouts.
Several others in speech bandwidth compression -- probably in use by most here, incidentally (pretty much anyone who uses a phone of any kind), but I signed them over to the guys who paid for the development. Huge money, none to me, no big deal though, I was glad of the job at the time and the job paid well and was tons of fun.
It didn't occur to me to patent nonlinear editing of audio and video, which as far as I can tell, I was first with (wrote a book on it, made the very first high quality PC hardware for it too).
Wouldn't have mattered -- enough money (and it turns out there's a lot in that game...now) can break any patent. I made money off that indirectly, as it attracted work for my consulting business to the tune of millions to implement our tricks in more mundane things like phone and pa systems -- not so bad, we got paid in cash and took no risks, nice risk/reward ratio there.
(and as an aside, that's how I think the fusion thing plays out if one of us gets it going on for real -- someone else will steal the IP, no problems with that much money involved, but getting credit as "the father of fusion" -- that's enough for a life of very high paid speaking tours and any lab you want built with any help you want to hire -- makes the people "stealing" it look good, they'll go for it, and I have experienced it already, see above)
Once myself and another guy worked on and perfected an almost perfect burgler alarm, based on acoustic characterization of a room (holographic sonar). We were treated to a court appearance over which other entity would get the full rights to it -- the company we worked for (who contributed nothing whatever) or their customer -- the Army, who did have a need for such to keep things like Nukes out of the hands of thieves with an alarm that was practically impossible to make false alarms on (a favorite trick of thieves to get you to ignore the real thing). We won, but lost -- the company wasn't happy with the deal we made -- the Army got use, free (but did pay us to develop it further), the company got nada (which was fair, they didn't do anything to make it happen at all) and we got...fired.
Last one was pure vanity -- I solved an otherwise hotly attempted problem in speech pitch detection in realtime, the answer to the robotic sound of most speech codecs, as this was good enough to be instant and pulse by pulse. Signed that one over to a company that built tactile hearing aids for deaf so they could get pitch info even in syllables that only have 2-4 pitch pulses, something you can't get by lip reading. That was a neat little product, but....no money in it for anybody really.
Apple etc might pay to license your thing in NZ (if it affects something that has nothing to do with FM), which is kind of off the radar in market share, while getting their own patent in the places that mean real money. But I doubt even that -- antenna-gate was due to them refusing to license a 50 cent per copy antenna design for their flagship iPhone -- that's their attitude about those things.
Finding a lawyer who will work on contingency and is also good is going to be a trick indeed -- only the ones in need of work (or where there's an enormous payoff evident) work on contingency. This is just one of the things that makes my point -- patents are for the rich, to keep the rest down, a mechanism to hurt the little guy. Which is the opposite of the language used to justify their existence, of course.
Today's troll on slashdot
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/07/06/ ... ok-CoolingMy reason for even bringing this up at all is the danger to us little guys working on fusion -- should any of us get "lucky", the system is not designed to reward us for our work and risk (money and time) we put in, not hardly. And despite Chris' skepticism, look at how many patents exist for fusion devices that don't work, even in our little amateur community. Even Steve S has one on his thing that doesn't work. But now if you do beam on beam fusion some way (my current interest) he can claim you're infringing....he might not win, but you lose no matter what, as it costs money to defend, and even more not to. Steve might be entirely reasonable about it himself -- but what if he sells it to someone?
There are two distinct risk scenarios that are *caused* by this system that was touted to eliminate such risks.
One is that someone with plenty of money simply patents your work and runs with it to their own benefit, maximizing profits off the very populace we were trying to help, and leaving you in the dust. This is very possible, it's been done over and over -- best lawyers win no matter the facts. And in this case, I don't think it matters if you win someday, after millions of bucks spent in trying and a decade of lawyering. To me, that's not winning -- I'll die before that plays out.
The other is some troll who patents everything he can think of, using either straight ahead or submarine tactics, and then comes out of the woodwork once you make money to sue you. All you need to attract such is deep pockets from success -- your own patents would be in more trouble if they really made money for example. Enough to make one guy rich ain't real money to the people interested in stealing from you -- pocket change, so you're pretty safe. Come up with something that looks like solving the problems of a trillion dollar annual energy business -- now even governments will want to steal it.
The point of this board is to establish prior art on our work, or at least it's one of the main motivations -- the other one is to encourage collaboration by actual practitioners of the arts involved and get the many-eyes effect, just like in open source software, and it's working. Just get it set down who did what and who did it first, at low or no cost to the posters here, so things have at least a chance of turning out "fair" in some sense down the road. In the US, this automatically grants copyright on those things that fall under that -- interesting twist of law, and since this place is backed up by an uninterested 3rd party, with timestamps, is legal in courts as evidence of who did what and when for either copyright or patent prior art.
Sadly, as Chris quoted from the patent "reform" law now under consideration, it's now going from priority of invention to priority of *filing for a patent* which dilutes this inexpensive method of protection for the rightful owners of intellectual property created by posters here. It's not really a "reform" at all, it's a disaster that favors the bigs (who can afford to patent the craziest of brain-farts just in case) even more over the smalls like us. As Arthur might say "some new use of the word reform with which I was previously unfamiliar" -- we can hope it doesn't go through as proposed.
I'd like to not have to be a lawyer to be a scientist, but sadly, that's not the way the planet is rolling just now.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.