Core77

Since its inception in 1790, the US patent system has delivered a period of unprecedented innovation. By protecting the long-term ownership of new ideas, the system enabled individual inventors to profit from their innovations without fear of the theft of their intellectual property. By guaranteeing future proceeds, entrepreneurs could be motivated to pursue new and innovative modes of invention, with potential revenues promising to offset the significant financial burdens incurred along the way.

With hundreds of thousands of patents filed every year, however, the United States Patent and Trademark Office is now feeling the burden of the sheer volume of creative thought. Individual patents can take up to 18 months between submission and publication, resulting in the ubiquitous notation "patent pending." As any patent lawyer will tell you, the enforceability of patents is directly correlated not only with the robustness of the patent's claims, but also with the legal resources and funding that can be applied to actively pursuing patent violations in the court of law. A brief review of www.uspto.gov will easily demonstrate the sheer scale of the Byzantine patent organization.

Mostert and Apolzon's book From Edison to iPod: Protect Your Ideas and Make Money ably explains the variety of legal mechanisms an aspiring creative can use to "protect" their intellectual property. For a layperson, the book serves as a quick overview of design patents, utility patents, copyright protection, and a variety of other modes of protection. At the same time, however, the book fails to fully account for the daunting business realities that now face most new patent applicants.

With the emergence of the Internet and new media formats like mp3s, many types of media can propagate quite freely in the digital age. As a consequence of the inefficiencies of the system, many individuals are choosing instead to engage in "open source" ventures (http://www.opensource.org/) like LINUX, where many individuals contribute their time to a group effort for the betterment of the whole.

As a consequence, a quick review of business periodicals will reveal a number of pundits proclaiming that our patent system is "broken." From the perspective of the individual designer, that dire prognostication is true for all practical purposes. Large corporations with dedicated in-house counsel can afford to pursue patent violators, while the little guy is often left behind. Some entrepreneurs even function as patent houses, filing "business practice" patents and even speculative inventions with no current real-world applications. Further, many big organizations actually require inventors hoping to sell their ideas to sign waivers of all their rights before they even enter a pitch meeting. So while the idea of walking into XYZ Corp with your Non-Disclosure Agreement in the hope of selling your idea for the newest widget sounds appealing, most laypeople will barely be able to secure a meeting.

Sadly, this leaves the target audience for this book out of luck. The real questions that struggling designers will face are practical more often than conceptual. So while From Edison to iPod does an admirable job giving a birds-eye view of a field that requires several years of graduate study to even approach, it raises as many questions as it answers. Even with a patent in hand, Mostert and Apolzon provide aspiring inventors with little ammunition to bring their inventions to market or to sell them to large corporations without getting fleeced in the process. Their review of current legal protections is accurate and enlightening, but it's a bit like the adage about asking the price of a luxury good -- if you have to ask, you probably can't afford it anyway.