© 2016 Don Baker dba android originals LC
I have to give the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office thanks, credit and high marks for helping me to write and file my patent, currently pending as US 2016/0027422 A1, “Acoustic-electric stringed instrument with improved body, electric pickup placement, pickup switching and electronic circuit”. It’s the bright side of the America Invents Act (AIA), which directs the USPTO to help small inventors succeed.
Then there’s the dark side, as reported by Scott Eden in “The Greatest American Invention”, Popular Mechanics, Jul/Aug 2016, pp 92-99. It details how the AIA was lobbied into being by large tech companies to deal with patent trolls, those who collect and file patents to sue deep pockets companies without ever producing a single product themselves. And how this has affected the small inventor, who has long been at the mercy of large companies with lots of lawyers, now even more so.
It tells the story of one Dr. Troy Norred, who filed patent 6,482,228 in 2000 on a replacement aortic valve, which currently accounts a 1.5 billion dollar annual market. And for which Dr. Norred receives not one penny or (until now) word of recognition. It tells how Dr. Norred spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, first trying to get his device into production, and then defending it from industrial poachers. The other kind of patent troll, those companies with lawyers on staff who troll for patents to poach, and then use those lawyers to deny the benefits of those patents to the actual inventors.
Dr. Norred could spend all that money asserting and defending his patent, in vain, because he had a medical practice to support his passion. Other small inventors are not so fortunate, and can beggar themselves trying to do the same, if they do not already live in poverty, hoping to get off the dole by the sweat of their brains.
I write this because I can see my own work going this way. The existing guitar companies are no more receptive to me than medical device companies were to Dr. Norred. What, for example, would stop the 800-pound gorilla of the music business, Fender Musical Instruments Corp., from taking what it wants to produce for its profit, and fending me off with its many malicious lawyers? My filing Pro Se, In Forma Pauperis lawsuits, for which I could not appear in person in a DC courtroom?
Furthermore, I’m starting late in life to produce viable inventions. I no longer have the health and energy to start a business on my own, even if I had the resources and business experience. The Small Business Administration is geared to the young. Venture capital is geared to those with proven products in the market. No one that I can see, not even the various entrepreneur clubs and workshops, brings together finance, inventors and those with business drive and experience, to get new products off the ground.
In this cautionary tale, the AIA passed with the kind of bi-partisan support we no longer see in Washington. Who now will stand up for the small inventor in the political and business worlds? A certain Spaniard might have better luck with windmills.
A musician I know told me the story of a friend of his who invented and patented a new kind of fishhook. Which a major fishhook company promptly ripped off and fended him off for years in the courts with their lawyers. I gather that the inventor never got a profit from it and more likely went in the hole with legal costs.
None of this will stop me from inventing. It keeps me off the street and out of the loony bin. But I have to wonder if I will ever benefit from my intellectual product. This is the kind of thing that pushes the income gap ever wider, creating lasting resentment. Mario Puzo makes a similar point in a different arena in his novel, “The Sicilian”, describing the corruption of Italian government in bed with the Friends of the Friends, or Mafia. Which helped to export organized crime to the U.S. around and after WWII.
The way large businesses treat small inventors is very mafioso, Mario Puzo’s description of a thing of Sicilian beauty. Who knows what repercussions it will have?