A Little History
© 2016 Don Baker
I thought a little history might be in order. One of the members of reddit.com/r/guitars made an unfortunate comment asking me if I was a “patent troll”. Well, patent trolls don’t spend years working on their ideas just to sue big companies with deep pockets.
Have you ever gone up against lawyers by yourself? If you had, you might understand why William Shakespeare suggested killing them all. Lawyers are the patent trolls. And too often big companies are patent poachers, who use their lawyers to fend off the independent inventors who developed the patents they poach. Large companies have poached an idea or two of mine. Citizens United may have given corporations the right to free speech in politics, but it didn’t guarantee which ones have any morals.
No, we do this as a labor of love and vision, often with about as much hope of reward as winning Publishers Clearing House. It’s great to have vision. It’s even better to have the means to achieve it. And if you don’t have the means, the do-ray-me, the scratch, the grease, the lucre, the green, the coin, at least you can write about it. If for nothing else than to make it morally harder for large companies to claim your intellectual property as their own.
The following list is presented in the order of newest first, if and when the articles are added.
- Shooting the Bullet – April-May 2005 – simulating android originals LC artwork on a Fender Bullet ™ guitar with PhotoShop.