Posted on 09/17/2017 12:36:55 PM PDT by Pelham
For decades, individual inventors were granted 25 percent or more of all U.S. patents. This creativity was the foundation of dozens of new industries, thousands of new companies and millions of new jobs.
Yet beginning in the early 1980s, their portion of granted patents begin to drop like a rock in free fall. By 2015, individual inventors received only 5.8 percent. A decline so great and so fast has profound consequences and is not an accident or fluke.
A useful place to begin the examination of this decline is a 1998 interview of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates who was asked, Mr. Gates, whats your biggest worry? Whats your business nightmare?
Gates paused a bit and then said, Ill tell you what I worry about. I worry about some guy in a garage inventing something, a new technology, I have never thought about.
Prescient and ironic? Certainly, because at that very moment two guys named Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working in a Menlo Park garage inventing Google, which quickly became one of Microsofts worst business nightmares.
What Gates really feared was described by economist Joseph Schumpeter as the gale of creative destruction a process of economic mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. Inventors and their inventions most often drive this gale a process that makes them very dangerous to established ventures such as Microsoft and Apple.
In 1776, Adam Smith described such ventures almost baked-in genetic reaction to this Schumpeterian gale: People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
(Excerpt) Read more at ipwatchdog.com ...
I recall reading decades ago about changes in patent filing regulations. The changes made filing more expensive giving corporate thieves the advantage over garage upstarts. The corporations could fund the filing process faster than underfunded upstarts. The change made the news for one day. Since most Americans don't invent, no one complained. Corporate deep state won that round.
Not always. In the late 70s and 80s pro-life Catholics and pro-life Evangelicals used totally different English vocabulary to discuss abortion and pro-life. It was the source of much division and mis-trust in the movement. The others were not really pro-life because they didn't use the approved buzz words.
Gradually over time, the pro-life vocabulary merged. But even now, if someone tries to express the pro-life position in a creative way, they are suspect.
Now consider NLP that tries to categorize someone's political beliefs, either for fund raising of supporters, or for shunning of those who disagree and thus use hate speech.
The hardest part of the English language is figures of speech where the literal meaning is not the intended meaning: Sarcasm, Hyperbole, Parable, Similie, Metaphor, juxtaposition, antithesis, euphemism, irony, litotes, metonymy, oxymoron, paradox, personification, pun, cliche, synecdoche, etc. Even for us FReepers it is difficult to tell when a post should be taken literally rather than as a figure of speech. Thus some people use icons or special characters to indicate sarcasm or don't read this literally.
I have lots of “projects” but might have to go back to work. A couple may be worth millions/billions but I’m afraid even googling the idea may get someone ahead of my usual procrastinating inclinations. I cannot afford a patent attorney.
Can you search securely? So far my only strategy is to get say Google/Facebook or 5 largest cable companies (2 separate ideas) to bid against each other ($1,000,000 opening bid) with a vague description of the “patentable” invention and take an upfront fee with the provision that the winning bidder if disappointed could ask for arbitrators to assess the idea (mine, theirs and one “neutral” selected by the arbitrators and then say be entitled to 1/2 of 1 percent of the gross from the new “program”.
You sounded informed on the subject so I thought I’d ask for a couple of thoughts.
Why wouldn’t Google analyze ANY search with “patent” in the text to market/steal to appropriate companies? There’s my problem.
Charlie
Any thoughts?
The hard part (not really) is indexing the docs and building a thesaurus.
Which is why you build a thesaurus.
In building a thesarus, the easy part is synonyms. Homonyms are one hard part. Figures of speech are the other hard part.
Some homonym meanings are so different that they are not confused in the context. But some homonyms have meanings that are close, but clearly not the same. Often the meaning is difficult to determine.
Consider the difficulty. My Windows 10 spellchecker incorrectly changes they’re to their. It incorrectly changes many words. It especially likes to change a word with a specific techie meaning to a non-techie word that is similar, but not the same in spelling or meaning.
Assessing Repository Technology
Not much discussion on searching the author calls NLS, relevance feedback, I doubt WAIS actually did NLS but then again maybe. AutoLib was one hell of a system for its day, if I do say so myself. LOL.
I wrote a much improved system in JAVA which I have on my computer to this very day. I might just donate it to the open source community, if anyone showed an interest in a document/object management system.
Hi Charlie-
I use a search engine found on the homepage for the US Patent Office. You can download an entire patent in pdf form if you get a hit. You can search by idea, inventor and patent owner. I would assume this is a secure site, but I’m not sure.
Also a search engine found at Patent Lens is useful and (used to be) free. I’m only interested in finding ideas that have no patent applications listed or at least a patent application for a similar product. You can hire a professional patent attorney or agent do a rigorous patent search but that will cost around $600.
A provisional patent used to run about $100 and can be written by anyone. Usually only a page or two is needed.
If you use Google or others to search for patentable ideas, yes security may be an issue.
I am in the process of writing a book and have copyrighted several versions for $35 a pop. I do this because I submit query letters using gmail and I too worry to about plagiarism.
Google & Amazon have ended copyright protection.
They have monetized illegal copying to where quality is meaningless. All Amazon books are essentially uniform in price, and therefore poor quality. A novel is indistinguishable from a text message, and people do not pay money for texts.
Back when I used to buy a lot of books some of them were from Ignatius Press. These were absolutely beautifully constructed books- not collectors volumes or anything, just their standard run, but the quality jumped out at you.
I wonder if anyone growing up today has the same appreciation for real books over electronic ones.
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