Category: Patents

If Countries Have Souls “Then America’s Is the Patent System”

MrGatlingsTerribleMarvelBK2011-03-11.jpg

Source of book image: http://yourbooksworld.com/images/Biographies/mr-gatlings-terrible-marvel.jpg

(p. 46) [Julia Keller] discusses Lincoln’s little-known interest in personally testing new Army weapons and, in a brilliant passage, rhapsodizes about creativity and the Patent Office: “If a country can be said to possess a soul, then America’s is the patent system: the simple, fair method of staking claim to a new idea and getting the chance to make money from it.”

For the full review, see:
MAX BYRD. “The Bullet Machine.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., November 9, 2008): 46.
(Note: bracketed name added.)
(Note: the online version of the review is dated November 7, 2008.)

Book reviewed:
Keller, Julia. Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It. New York: Viking, 2008.

Abraham Lincoln’s Defence of the Patent System

William Rosen quotes a key passage from Abraham Lincoln’s speech on “Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements”:

(p. 323) The advantageous use of Steam-power is, unquestionably, a modern discovery. And yet, as much as two thousand years ago the power of steam was not only observed, but an ingenious toy was actually made and put in motion by it, at Alexandria in Egypt. What appears strange is that neither the inventor of the toy, nor any one else, for so long a time afterwards, should perceive that steam would move useful machinery as well as a toy. . . . . . . in the days before Edward Coke’s original Statute on Monopolies, any man could instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. . . . The (p. 324) patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery of new and useful things.

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.
(Note: italics and ellipses in original.)

France Lacked Good Patent Laws; Great French Inventors “Died Penniless”

(p. 367) If one secret to sustaining an inventive culture was making inventors into national heroes, it was a secret that didn’t translate well into French. Between 1740 and 1780, the French inclination to reward inventors not by enforcing a natural right but by the grant of pensions and prizes resulted in the award of nearly 7 million livres–approximately $600 million today–to inventors of largely forgot-(p. 268)ten devices, but Claude-François Jouffroy d’Abbans (inventor of one of the first working steamboats), Barthélemy Thimonnier (creator of the first sewing machine), and Airné Argand (a partner of Boulton and friend of Watt whose oil lamp became the world’s standard) all died penniless.

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

Kappos Says Private Company Would Have Run Patent Office Better

KapposDavidPatent2011-02-27.jpg “David Kappos of the Patent Office, with an Edison bulb.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) “There is no company I know of that would have permitted its information technology to get into the state we’re in,” David J. Kappos, who 18 months ago became director of the Patent and Trademark Office and undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property, said in a recent interview. “If it had, the C.E.O. would have been fired, the board would have been thrown out, and you would have had shareholder lawsuits.”

Once patent applications are in the system, they sit — for years. The patent office’s pipeline is so clogged it takes two years for an inventor to get an initial ruling, and an additional year or more before a patent is finally issued.
The delays and inefficiencies are more than a nuisance for inventors. Patentable ideas are the basis for many start-up companies and small businesses. Venture capitalists often require start-ups to have a patent before offering financing. That means that patent delays cost jobs, slow the economy and threaten the ability of American companies to compete with foreign businesses.

For the full story, see:

EDWARD WYATT. “U.S. Sets 21st-Century Goal: Building a Better Patent Office.” The New York Times (Mon., February 21, 2011): A1 & A3.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated February 20, 2011.)

Patent Importance Survives the Results of Moser’s Worlds Fairs Data Analysis

(p. 264) Petra Moser, now a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, spent four years examining more than 15,000 different inventions exhibited at nineteenth-century worlds fairs, and their equivalents, and discovered a fact that seems at first glance to discredit the idea that patent protection was essential for innovation: Nations without patent laws were in many cases just as inventive as those with them. Or even more inventive; some of the nations best represented at those industrial fairs actively discouraged the patenting of inventions.

The reason seems to be that whether or not they enforced a patent law, smaller nations or domains, such as the Netherlands and Switzerland, were vulnerable to the theft of their innovations by competitors in larger nations. The bargain of patent protection runs two ways: The state, in return for making an idea public, offers legal recourse to its creator should someone within the state steal the idea. Since making one’s invention public in a nation with patent protection offered protection against theft only up to its own borders, only a large nation offered a large enough market to make the deal a good one, and (in Moser’s words) the small nations “would have been silly to patent [their] innovations.”
This logic inhibited investment in entire categories of innovation. Those nations that relied on secrecy rather than patent tended to specialize in the sort of inventions that cannot be easily reverse–engineered, such as chemicals or dyes.

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.
(Note: italics and bracketed word in original.)

Luther Burbank’s Income Suffered Because His Inventions Could Not Be Patented

BurbankLuther2011-02-05.jpg

“Luther Burbank pollinating poppies in Santa Rosa, Calif.” Source of book image: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. C4) There is a particular type of potato at the heart of Jane S. Smith’s book about Luther Burbank, a man who described himself as an “evoluter of new plants.” Ms. Smith nicknames that potato “the lucky spud.” That turn of phrase is one of many reasons to appreciate “The Garden of Invention,” her colorful, far-reaching book about the genetic, agricultural, economic and legal issues raised by Burbank’s life and legend.
. . .
This book takes more than a passing interest in Burbank’s income, insofar as it reflected his legal ability to protect his scientific advances. In his early professional years he grappled with the doctrine that held that while a gold mine was real property and a machine to extract gold was intellectual property, the actual mineral belonged to anyone who could find it; ditto with potatoes. Throughout his career, even as he developed friendships with tycoons like Ford and Thomas Edison, Burbank lived under constant financial pressure to keep creating new plant products. “His income was entirely dependent on his latest marvel,” Ms. Smith writes

.

For the full review, see:
JANET MASLIN. “Books of The Times; The Curious Man Lucky Enough to Create ‘the Lucky Spud’.” The New York Times (Mon., May 4, 2009): C4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated May 3, 2009.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Smith, Jane S. The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants. New York: The Penguin Press, 2009.

Did Bell, or Gray, Invent the Telephone?

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Source of book image: http://www.xconomy.com/wordpress/wp-content/images/2008/01/telephone-gambit.jpg

A great and important debate is occurring about the desirability of the patent system. Should it be abolished, or reformed? If The Telephone Gambit book is right, one of the spectacular failures of the system is in the awarding of a patent to Bell for the telephone.
That’s a big “if”: some of the reviewers on Amazon give reasons for doubting Shulman’s story.
I hope to have time to look into this further.

(p. D10) It was a brilliant concept. But was it Bell’s? What had happened during his trip to Washington that allowed Bell to abandon the blind alleys he had been exploring and to suddenly, not incrementally, find the technological solution?

The answer to that question is a tale involving high-powered Washington lawyers, political influence, a patent clerk with a booze problem, and improper access to Elisha Gray’s patent filing, where Bell found the secret to making the telephone work. Mr. Shulman lays out the evidence — documentary, scientific, chronological and psychological — piece by damning piece. He shows most impressively how Bell’s subsequent behavior and actions are entirely in keeping with those of a decent and honorable man having to live most of his long life (Bell died in 1924) with the knowledge that behind his fortune and his fame lay a single instance of brazen dishonesty, of intellectual theft.
“The Telephone Gambit” is solid history, and Seth Shulman makes it as much fun to read as an Agatha Christie whodunit by using the techniques of historiography the way Hercule Poirot used his “little gray cells.” That’s no small accomplishment.

For the full review, see:
JOHN STEELE GORDON. “False Claim, Future Fortune.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., JANUARY 16, 2008): D10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Shulman, Seth. The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret. hardback ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.

Patent Processing Delay Increases to 3.82 Years

Economists who study patents, sometimes have found that outside of pharmaceuticals, patents seldom have strong positive effects on innovation. That has led some economists and policy advisers to conclude that the patent system has more costs than benefits. But another possibility, supported by facts in the article quoted below, is that the patent system is badly designed and badly implemented.
So rather than abandon the patent system, maybe we should reform its rules, and allow the Patent Office to keep all of its fees to use for hiring and training more staff to process patents.

(p. 4A) MILWAUKEE — A year and a half after President Barack Obama appointed an IBM Corp. executive to fix the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, it still cannot keep up with its work­load, continuing to battle the ef­fects of years of congressional raids on its funding.
. . .
Also unchanged is a bureau­cracy that publishes entire pat­ent applications online 18 months after they are filed, whether they have been acted upon or not. That puts American ingenuity up for grabs, free to anyone with an Internet connection.
. . .
Applications now languish so long that technologies can be­come obsolete before a patent is ruled upon.
Consider:
>> The agency took 3.82 years on average for each patent it is­sued last year, up from 3.66 years in 2009 and 3.47 in 2008. Many took years longer.
>> The total number of appli­cations awaiting a final decision remains stuck at 1.22 million, nearly unchanged from levels of the past three years.
>> The agency imposed a hiring freeze in 2009 and lost examiners last year, and has been unable to replace them because of budget constraints.
In 2010, the Patent Office col­lected $53 million in fees that it wasn’t allowed to keep, according to limits imposed by Congress.
Delays by the Patent Office often inflict the deepest damage on garage inventors and start-up companies that may have no oth­er assets than their unprotected ideas.
. . .
“A lot of companies actually die awaiting their patent because the Patent Office is so slow,” said Michel, the former patent court judge.

For the full story, see:
MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL. “Patent agency more harm than help for many inventors; Though more than 1 million applications are stalled, they’re already posted online.” Omaha World-Herald (Sun., January 23, 2011): 4A.
(Note: ellipses added.)

REVISE THIS ONE: Patents Needed to Provide Money for “the Many Fruitless Experiments”

(p. 234) . . . ; together, Watt and Arkwright wrote a manuscript entitled “Heads of a Bill to explain and amend the laws relative to Letters Patent and grants of privileges for new inventions,” essentially a reworking of Coke’s Statute of 1623 that had created England’s first patent law. In addition to its policy prescriptions, which were largely an unsuccessful argument against the requirement that patent applications be (p. 235) as specific as possible, the manuscript offered a remarkable insight into Watt’s perspective on the life of the inventor, who should, in Watt’s own (perhaps inadvertently revealing) words, “be considered an Infant, who cannot guard his own Rights”:

An engineer’s life without patent is not worthwhile . . . few men of ingenuity make fortunes without suffering to think seriously whether the article he manufactures might, or might not, be Improved. The man of ingenuity in order to succeed must seclude himself from Society, he must devote the whole powers of his mind to that one object, he must persevere in spite of the many fruitless experiments he makes, and he must apply money to the expenses of these experiments, which strict Prudence would dedicate to other purposes. By seclusion from the world he becomes ignorant of its manners, and unable to grapple with the more artful tradesman, who has applied the powers of his mind, not to the improvement of the commodity he deals in, but to the means of buying cheap and selling dear, or to the still less laudable purpose of oppressing such ingenious workmen as their ill fate may have thrown into his power.

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.
(Note: the second ellipsis and the italics in original; the first ellipsis added.)

Taking Away Patents Would Be “Cutting Off the Hopes of Ingenious Men”

(p. 208) For Watt, the theft (as he saw it) of his work was a deeply personal violation. In (p. 209) 1790, just before realizing the extent of what he perceived as Hornblower’s theft of his own work he wrote,

if patentees are to be regarded by the public, as . . . monopolists, and their patents considered as nuisances & encroachments on the natural liberties of his Majesty’s other subjects, wou’d it not be just to make a law at once, taking away the power of granting patents for new inventions & by cutting off’ the hopes of ingenious men oblige them either to go on in the way of their fathers & not spend their time which would be devoted to the encrease [sic] of their own fortunes in making improvements for an ungrateful public, or else to emigrate to some other Country that will afford to their inventions the protections they may merit?

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.
(Note: italics and ellipsis in original.)

Financial Gain an Important Motive for Invention

(p. 121) In 1930, Joseph Rossman, who had served for decades as an examiner in the U.S. Patent Office, polled more than seven hundred patentees. producing a remarkable picture of the mind of the inventor. Some of the results were predictable; the three biggest motivators were “love of inventing,” “desire to improve.” and “financial gain,” the ranking for each of which was statistically identical. and each at least twice as important as those appearing (p. 122) down the list, such as “desire to achieve,” “prestige,” or “altruism” (and certainly not the old saw, “laziness,” which was named roughly one-thirtieth as frequently as “financial gain”). A century after Rocket, the world of technology had changed immensely: electric power, automobiles, telephones. But the motivations of individual inventors were indistinguishable from those inaugurated by the Industrial Revolution.
. . .
In the same vein, Rossman’s survey revealed that the greatest obstacle perceived by his patentee universe was not lack of knowledge, legal difficulties, lack of time, or even prejudice against the innovation under consideration. Overwhelmingly, the largest obstacle faced by early twentieth-century inventors (and, almost certainly, their ancestors in the eighteenth century) was “lack of capital.” Inventors need investors.

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.
(Note: ellipsis added.)