The Low Point--a view from the Valley: The innovation game

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Dear Axey,

Patents are designed to allow an INVENTOR to have exclusive rights to his discovery for a limited time.

The Constitution says nothing about transferring these rights to another person, let alone a fictitious person.

The major problem with patents, as I see it, is that the limited time does not start with the first use of the invention. This means that even five years after the first use, or in the case of using a playground swing sideways, well over 50 years after I first used this trick, the U. S. Patent Office will still grant a patent.

How many patents have been granted for vehicle stability control systems in the last 15 or so years. If the U. S. Patent Office had properly disqualified these for prior art, such patents would not exist. The prior art to which I refer is the "Curve Master" which was invented by Mr. Arthur Vogel, in Columbus, Ohio in the early 1950s. It was demonstrated at Lockbourne AFB with two Ford sedans. They both ran a marked circle on the runway, or taxiway, at increasing speeds. The sedan not equipped with the "Curve Master" rolled over. The one equipped with the "Curve Master" banked into the turn and eventually spun out without rolling.

I know that Mr. Vogel had applied for patents on his invention. Done your way, Mr. Vogel, or his descendants could either be very rich now, or they could have prevented the current safety of the current stability control systems.

Of course the saving grace of the system as it was used then was that the implementation of the hardware was what could be patented, not the idea. So current electronic stability controls would still exist. in effect, at that time and all prior times, a patent could best be described as a hardware copyright. The idea was free for everyone to build upon as long as they did not copy the originator's hardware within the short limited time. Software patents should be treated the same way. They should be converted to copyrights, with short limited lifetimes.

Or perhaps we should just redefine a patent as a copyright on hardware. That is really what it was until someone managed to obtain a patent on software.

Posted by: Update victim   Posted on: 10/24/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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