jason

Annals of Invention: The Flash of Genius: The New Yorker is a scary article. Of course we know about the horror stories of corporations stealing inventions. And we know what happened to Mr. Gates just because he was able to keep ownership of his work.

In November, 1962, Bob Kearns was driving his Ford Galaxie through the streets of Detroit when it started to rain lightly. Kearns turned the wipers on low. In those days, even the most advanced wipers had just two settings, one for steady rain and one for heavy rain; in a mizzling rain, they screeched back and forth across the glass, mesmerizing the driver, and occasionally causing accidents. Kearns’ vision was already impaired as a result of an accident nine years earlier, when, on his wedding night, he was hit in the left eye by a flying champagne cork. Now, straining to see through the windshield, half thinking about his lousy wipers and half thinking about his bad eye, Kearns had what the Wall Street Journal later called “the kind of inspiration that separates inventors from ordinary people.” He thought, Why can’t a wiper work more like an eyelid? Why can’t it blink? The idea for the intermittent windshield wiper entered his mind.
Sometime this year, a little more than three decades after his good idea came to him, Kearns will go to trial in a suit he has brought against General Motors. Kearns, who is sixty-five years old, has already defeated Ford and Chrysler in court, and he stands to collect more than twenty million dollars from them for infringing his patents on the intermittent windshield wiper…. His remarkable success has made him one of the most famous inventors in the country, a hero to thousands of inventors with their own patent-infringement horror stories to tell….
There is widespread feeling in patent departments of corporations around the country that Kearns’ case represents a frightening precedent…. “The story today is not the big company screwing the little guy but the little guy screwing the big company. It’s getting easier and easier for the little guy to do it.”
The United States patent system is designed for the independent inventor—for the person whom Nikola Tesla described as “the lone worker who follows the fleeting inspiration of a moment and finally does something that has not been done before….” Now most inventors work in huge corporate research centers. Individuals surrender their ideas to the corporation, and for doing so they receive regular salaries. But the patent system, together with the law that has accrued around it, still rests on the eighteenth-century idea of the inventor, and in court a lone inventor with a patent is a formidable opponent for any corporation to face. (emphasis added)

What scares me is the tone of the article. It is like this is a bad thing. We’re not talking about shady companies who buy patents and try to put the pressure on big companies. We’re talking about stealing ideas. Is complaining about the theft of your intellectual property by corporations a problem?

Oh, and there’s a movie coming out about it that I probably won’t see.