WHEN most people hear the name Thomas Edison they think of a great scientist and inventor, not a ruthless businessman. Edison was somewhat of a raider, who became legendary for the number of patents he had amassed. Just how inventive was he really? Well, actually, he had the habit of taking other people's ideas and claiming credit/monopoly for them after slight modifications. Edison essentially hacked the patent office, just like some of today's patent trolls. This is a subject which we alluded to before [1, 2].
Thomas Edison's plot to hijack the movie industry
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But what ultimately did the Edison monopoly in was the assumption that its legal/technological dominance over the trade, and its moral stance, would trump the public's demand for ever more creative motion pictures. Unlike the independents, the MPCC system did not invest in its network. Consumers would simply have to watch Edison Trust fare, the monopoly's principals figured.
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Thus the Edison Trust was sunk, even before a federal court agreed with prosecutors that the Patents Company and General Film had broken every antitrust principle in the book, "terrorizing exchanges and exhibitors" and driving away competitors by "arbitrary, oppressive, and high-handed methods."
The sage took his defeat like a good sport. He was, after all, still America's beloved inventor. At the end of the conflict, Edison dropped by to dedicate Universal's new all-electric movie studio, now located in a pleasant southern California town called Hollywood.
Take heed, tech giants of today. Some of your companies or services aren't much older than the Edison Trust was when it collapsed. How much of your current business strategy is based on offering new and original products, and how much of it is based on laws, courts, and the fact that you got there first?
"Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure," Thomas Edison once warned. He ought to know.
Patents have a life span of 17 or 20 years. To keep them valid, companies must pay maintenance fees every four years. Once they expire, the holder is expected to remove the numbers from products.
However, it is often difficult to separate a claim into technical and non-technical features, and an invention may have technical aspects which are hidden in a largely non-technical context
Comments
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2010-09-03 10:39:32
Google has mostly been the target of bogus lawsuits. A quick search for "Google patent lawsuit" at Yahoo (Bing) turns up no lawsuit launched by Google. That's based on the summaries because the articles Bing turns up are all from sites so Microsoft dominated that they don't work with the 3.5 branch of Konqueror.
There are other historical examples of USPTO abuse retarding industry but nothing compares to the software patent fraud. Glass bottle companies are probably the worst, where there were only two makers of glass bottle machines in the US which ruthlessly controlled bottling companies that were, in turn, equally ruthless monopolies like Coke. The two machine companies had a web of patents they used against everyone else and each other. Automobile patents have been mentioned here and elswhere recently. Few of the patents abused by those companies are as ridiculous as the flood of business method patents created by the State Street decision that made a loophole for business method patents implemented by computer. Because computers are essential to all business today, the tax on society and audacity of the non free software fraud is much greater than the burden imposed by any single abusive industry of a century ago.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2010-09-03 11:07:00