To patent or not to patent. That is the question.
By Murry W Rhodes (C) 20230628
So you have your first-ever idea and you’ve heard about getting patents to protect your idea. Nice. You make an application and you wait for a global search to see if someone else has either published or applied for an idea like yours. You wait and it’s either BINGO or NO-GO. OR is it?
The process is an authorised money redistribution scam and a protective one designed by those at high levels of investment to restrict innovation by creating regulatory guidelines with paywalls that only the rich can afford.
Why? Not sure but perhaps it helps control the financial way things happen so the rich can get rich richer while the poor get poorer while watching the rich get richer as the poor get etc.
Anyway, that’s my rant over. Now for some fun stuff.
I have two direct experiences with patent laws and since then I’ve come to learn that my own experience is not unique and similar ones have been written in historical accounts all over the globe and for some extremely famous moments of innovation and invention. I kind of feel glad that I’ve learned about it by making the mistakes myself.
I’m writing this now because at present my research has led to a thing that could really help the planet. In fact, it’s led to three things/ideas/models that could really help the planet’s life have a much brighter future. A brighter one than the current path it seems to be on with regard to climate change, fossil fuels and crazy leadership quarrels over the crumbling crumbs of Earth.
Ironic claims of dominion over a planet that was never destined to be a forever thing. An existence where advancing the species into a successful space-exploring critter might actually be a doable thing without all this fumbling for crumbs.
Currently, the way to protect intellectual property for science is through copyright and publication into journals for peer review and for new inventive gizmos, it is all about patents.
A patent application can be declined if the gizmo is too simple or if the gizmo presents more science than the currently known science of the day. Case in point. The Telescope. Galileo Galilei didn’t invent it. The earliest patent application for it was done in Holland and it was declined on the basis of it being too scientific in nature. There were other complications too like multiple claims of innovation but this was going back a few centuries now and so as the story goes, Galileo was a well enough resourced science teacher and engineer who exploited the science to make a mobile telescope and the rest is history. I love the things we do.
Too simple?, well my first experience of patent applications was soon after I’d had my back injury and doctors said I may not be able to work hard labouring jobs anymore. I was an unskilled, uneducated labourer and so with a broken money maker, ( my back) my future was about looking for ways of making enough to pay the bills. Why not try to materialise an old idea I’d had as a teenager and see about manufacturing processes and making it and of course see if I could get a patent to secure the intellectual property? Life’s an adventure so why not?
Cut out a small specially shaped/designed piece of neoprene ( wetsuit material) to suit the curvature of hand grips and add fasteners so they can be wrapped around handles to increase the diameter of the grips and also provide some cushioning. The idea came from riding my bike to work each day and suffering from road jarring on the joints and always having black sweaty icky hands from the handles. I worked in a souvenir factory where neoprene can coolers were made and I started using the can coolers on my handlebars.
My product called the Rhodeeze was tailored specifically for handles. Shaped and cut and professionally sewn with Velcro ( as seen in the photo in the right column ) or studded brass clipping button fasteners. Then packaged and ready for sale but not before having applied for a patent pending number to include on the packaging. My market research was in the pipeline and out of ten Bicycle shops, 5 agreed to consign the product, 2 bought some outright, 2 suggested to return when more marketing was in place and they were popular and 1 was an awkward ass who claimed he could make the items himself and so “why should I buy them from you?”. I pointed to the patent pending number on the packaging. “Well if you do that, I still get a cut so there’s that.”
I mentioned them to my doctor and no sooner had I described them, than he insisted that several of his arthritis patients might use them on brooms and knives etc. So he happily bought a few pairs to help some of his patients. So the product was good and there was certainly a market for it, and after almost a year of waiting to hear back from the patent office, it was looking like a promising way to start earning some coin to pay the bills. With a patent in place then at least the western market would provide some type of investment opportunity.
Too simple. The patent application was rejected because it was too simple and not scientific or complex enough. It was also rejected because there existed an insulation tape that was a roll of sticky tape adhesive with foam specifically for tennis racquets. The sticky tape issue was nothing really. It was a roll of tape that could only be used on one application whereas the Rhode-Eze fasteners made the handle grips removable and reusable and applicable to several handle shapes and sizes so there was some variation.
My patent attorney assured me that this was a common type of decline and given the obvious discrepancies between the tape version that it would only take a few professionally written and drawn descriptions of the item. How much would that cost? I asked. I had already spent most of my savings thus far on patent searches and communications and production. The magic figure he mentioned was way out of my ability to pay and this patent process seemed to be a progressive financial cost with an uncertain open chequebook pathway.
This closed that innovation from advancing. I still have one packet of the Rhode-Eze in my possession floating around somewhere as a reminder of how the patent system works or quite the opposite. How it restricts innovation to the rich. I was 24 at the time. I went through the back rehab program as depressing as that whole process is for the pain and the logistics and so the worker’s compensation insurance company found me a very low physically demanding job selling guns and bows in a gun shop. The ballistics and physics behind firearms became quite an interesting part of my life as too did that whole industry.
Too much science. My next patent application experience was of a very different nature and an interesting lesson to learn about science. This was the polar opposite of simplicity. I made the application to protect the intellectual property of an idea. As mentioned earlier I was no scholar so scholarly things above high school maths were a little above me including the systemic nuance of the industry of intellectual property protection that exist in those higher places. Other than wives’ tales and rumours I had no real idea about how copyright worked or science at the time. So I made my application and thankfully my patent attorney didn’t stretch out the process for extra fees but made it very clear that my patent would fail because it was too scientific in nature. The science was about ballistics but not for firearms, for something a bit different.
So my application was rejected for being too sciency and by law, the application still had to be kept by the offices in the archives for at least seven years before some junior clerk would be tasked with trashing out the expired applications.
It’s one of the lessons that remind me of Albert Einstein’s early career in the patent clerk's office. Where applications get archived and junior clerks get given boring tasks as part of their induction. Tasks that higher-level employees might not waste their time on, like cleaning out the folders of failed applications that no longer need to be kept in archives.
Light was one of the more popular topics of science in those days so I wonder how many of those failed applications might have been by non-scholars making applications that were always destined to be declined for being too scientific. Young Albert must have had fun reading through those failed applications for being too scientific. Especially with the few tools he’d picked up in his studies.
Anyway, my own idea was rejected for being too scientific. It was quite simply a planet formation model that used the ballistics of surface solar activity to eject matter that would recombine atoms for thermal expansions/cooling and form a planet or two. The maths was iterative and basic but the data I’d used was from official publications and textbooks so it was quite a nice little project linking mass and density with some angular moments. One that I’d sent out to several space observatories around the globe in the hope of getting some help to polish it up or prove it wrong. Nonetheless other than a response or two asking for funding for resources to be able to answer the question, very little came of it at the time and I still had a future to figure out how I was going to stay busy and hopefully pay the bills.
I was 28 years old when I decided my fate would be left to the world and so I packed my life into a backpack that was half full of painkillers and anti-inflammatories and bought an around-the-world ticket to see the world as a final bucket list item. Find a nice place to do the humane business on a work donkey with a broken leg and relish the ride for what it had been so far. It didn’t turn out that way since travel opened my eyes to the world and just how much I didn’t know but wanted to with a passion over and above the pains.
I returned home at 30 years old and I returned to school to gets me an edumacation. I did OK and was invited to do a physics degree at a pretty good university where I discovered a whole mountain of opportunities to learn interesting things.
I was not networked or parentally guided into a career-minded study regimen. I was just there to gain knowledge and tools of maths and physics and chemistry and applicable applications of all the undergrad tools I could grasp. So I did. If a job came of it then cool.
Although before I could finalise my studies with any one of the degrees I had to leave university to go and work in geophysics to help pay the adult bills. At thirty-odd years old, bank loans and stuff were a little more concerning and negatively consequential than completing academic courses. I was living in an old paint shed to save on rent if that’s any indication of how simple life was at the time so with bank loans etc. there was a need to leave my studies behind until I could get financial enough to return.
I never did get back to completing the degrees since life and circumstance had a different role for me to play. So I gained some tools in maths, physics and chemistry applicable to energy, cosmology, geology and archaeology.
So I went from geophysics to electrical systems and then to music. Life has certainly been an interesting rollercoaster since much of all of this was done in the outback of Australia. Geophysics was Iron ore exploration through the state of Western Australia in some incredibly isolated and beautiful places. The electrical work had me solving and resolving and fixing off-grid government electrical systems once again in isolated places where resources were scarce and innovation to fix things and remain within the safety regulations meant some cool creativity and ingenuity.
Music? well. My back injuries and age matured together and so music was the final softest physical job I could do and it was quite a nice little success story on its own. The outback had a self-taught piano singing piano man entertainer and this was perhaps the most intensive job I had. Not physically by for all the learning curves. The music itself was a challenge having to come up with a fast way of learning how to play and sing songs well enough to perform to tourists and others. The tech side of things from the audio and recording studios in an isolated place where one can only get things done if done by one’s self so I built a studio inside an old bus and recorded albums for sale and songs for the radio. Very backyard but still it was nice. There’s an album of my original songs you can listen to while reading. Just click on the image of it in the right column. Or look me up on Spotify for a few old nostalgic hit cover songs.
So Covid-19 came along and the world did what it did. I was already isolated in the outback of Australia so although there were some changes I was certainly well protected from the horrors I would hear of or see on the news or online. The world did shut down and so the main change I had was that performing was now no longer a thing. How does one keep busy in such a time? Tinkering and learning stuff.
I pulled out my old space theory from decades ago and started trying my hand at fiction writing. Space fiction of course since my theory was about the projectiles ejecting from cooling stars. With writing comes research and so my research into the narrative discovered an interesting article from NASA published in mid-2022. It was the Star Betelgeuse that had just performed an almost exact replica of what my theory had predicted. The story sprouted, completely unexpected, unpredictable, unprecedented like never before that completely astounded scientists around the globe. At least that’s what the headlines said. I wondered if any of the people who I’d sent my theory too remembered reading a poorly written and very iteratively simple mathematical model that described this scenario almost precisely. I guess I probably would have heard something back from them had any remembered so I guess my little tin hat theory would have just been trashed along with the many other theories from non-affiliated folks such as it seems to be the way of many a science institute.
So it is what is and I remain unperturbed by the systemic bottleneck of creativity in science and the oversight of non-affiliated creatives and was happy to see my theory materialise into our observable universe. So I carried on with my research only this time I went a little further, dug a little deeper and made some interesting observations. I started in our solar system which led into the galaxy and then even a little further still. My attention started to focus on the smaller things like particles and atoms and even beyond particles and into the quantum field type flux behaviours. It was quite an interesting journey and one that led to a rather simple sequence of energy transitions and transformations of symmetrical systems. One might say that my research tells the story of an early universe and the origins of the energy and matter within it. Others might not agree but that’s fine, we all have our things to cling to and the evidence to tell our stories.
The more interesting part of that journey was that I was researching the goings-on of atoms and energy that lead to a special little sequence that can be replicated quite simply with very accessible materials to create a thing that would be extremely useful if we ever engineered deep space vessels capable of lasting millions or billions of years or as required for such long journeys through deep space before arriving to a new home planet. An asset-class planet that would be determined to have been ejected long after we even began the journey and by the algorithms of the simplified origins of energy and materials model mentioned earlier. Basically knowing when a star will eject planets is more of an advantage than finding a distant planet now and trying to make our way there since time in space is not our friend and planets have their own cycles, most of which do not include long windows for the habitability of life.
The only problem with that useful thing is that it can be quickly assembled out of very accessible materials which would mean every person on the planet with the recipe’s method would know how to make a thing that would only cause problems down here on the planet. So it’s a recipe that can only ever really see the light of day after we are fully committed and invested in the deep space phase of our natural cycle. If we get that far.
OK so. Back to inventions and patents. This planet was never a forever thing and so we either fizzle out in this solar system without trying or Earth’s life progresses to the next home. Our rocket ships are cute but will not do it, not even close. They are sloppy and dangerous at best and the best they can provide is a tin can capsule heavily reliant on unreliable tech that might be lucky to last a thousand years on the journey. There are no time warps or warp drive wormholes or wonderful things like that in our tool belt as we only have real-life materials and speed kills in space as it does on our roads so although speed is good it is a secondary priority in the purpose of getting from A to B.
The project that needs to occur is considerably much bigger than any rocket ship can provide and it will require a planet of people unified to the course because much like a flower the project of maturity will require a planetary effort of resources and labour to accomplish.
In order to accomplish this global task it does require energy and lots of it.
This is what this other idea is all about. Energy for the planet to carry out what is required so all our ancestors can be made proud of our unified efforts to ensure the preservation and perpetuation of Earth’s life’s biodiversity including us human critters beyond the expiry of this planet. It was never a forever thing and we either adapt or die, if we die then hopefully it’s done trying so we earn the rights to revelations. Or die proud, whichever. It would be a shame if we just went from dust to dust without trying for real. Nature is a beautiful thing and it is well within our ability to succeed in space but we need to wake up from the tinker toy rocket ships and get real. A flower’s investment is all about the seeds. The investment is all about energy and fibres.
So why all the guff about patents and copyrights?
I call this THE Energetic Anti-Reciprocal Transformation Hub.
THE EARTH
It’s a very simple design. Perhaps too simple for a patent application. This means that whatever investment happens will not likely have any patent application other than some design-specific or engineering problem-solving devices. So if this idea were to be taken on board then every investor should know that a patent is highly unlikely. So there will not be a financial return on the intellectual property however and this is where market flooding and manufacturer aspects come into the profit side of things in addition to the tariff of energy that this energy provides a community. Why profit? The profit is to go toward the larger project of research and development of deep space vessels. Once the vessels are ready and we are committed to the project then this will be a good time to commence work on the other energy thing I mentioned above that can’t be mentioned until the commitment has occurred.
The science? Well, THE EARTH is not based on new science at all in fact it’s just a simple application of very well-known science that has not yet been configured or exploited quite in this way. This is a good thing because the known science of it backs up the maths of it and vice versa.
ENVIRONMENTALLY - It will prove to be the most environmentally friendly energy solution to date. Proper management and installation requirements may dictate that certain practices must occur to ensure efficiency and these practices will improve the quality of the planet’s current environment.
- It is not chemical nor nuclear nor does it produce fumes or toxic waste.
It will have an environmental impact that will be more positive than negative.
It will have an environmental impact that will need to be carefully monitored prior to and during activation and acted upon so as to ensure the preservation of all life within the environments into which the device will be installed.
ENERGY SUPPLY - The energy supplied at any one time will be calculable to within an acceptable margin of difference to ( in conjunction with other energy supplies ) not disrupt the community supply as long as no act of GOD or severe storms or other natural disasters occur. If Natural events do occur then the very structure of it has sufficient flexibility to expect less damage than other energy supply systems.
So, it is what it is. A simple and efficient thing that can certainly provide some of if not all of the required energy for a planet focussed on maturing into a deep space species of success. It will last for as long as we are here to exploit it or for as long as we need it.
So for now it looks like nuclear energy is the best provider of energy dollar for dollar but since we’ve already proven that our own culture and nature are not nearly stable enough to ensure a safe future with a planet covered in nuclear plants then a next best solution needs to exist and THE EARTH may be it.
Wind and Solar originally were touted as little more than bandaid fixes and that was honest and remains true today but the investors of this technology chose to gear up and turn these wind and solar gizmos into the only solution. They scar the planet, they need fossil fuel energy to make them and cause more problems than the energy they give back. Using bandaids to try to stem an artery flow is superfluous. Besides, arterial bleeding or Climate Change fear is just a campaign to sell more gizmos.
This investor issue plays its own role in the energy system I mentioned above because it is not likely to secure a patent, nor will there be any new science to make royalties from, it is just a simple device that will help provide energy for the planet if we really wanted too. Whatever profits come from such a device will likely be for the manufacturer and then those who sell the energy to whichever communities that want to buy it.
Either way. It’s sad to see the planet torn between snake-charming climate fearmongers and economies of people that really cannot afford the costs despite the fears. Bandaids don’t mend broken bones.
Such as it is. Here we are. There is a solution for the planet but getting it to the right people who can implement the production and exploitation of such a thing is the biggest problem. Or one of them anyway.
Something to ponder on.
Would you invest in a thing that will solve one of the world’s problems even though you may not see a personal financial return?
If no one does then The Earth is patently…
Cheers Muz.
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Find more blogs, cool stuff and other stuff and live longer and prosper at my website. :) www.muzduz.com
Innovation
The ancient authorities laugh.
When little lizards get in the water.
The last surviving pair. :) NOT for SALE.
Where simple innovation ends up for being too simple.
We move on, we evolve and who knows how things transform. :)
Muz backing on keys for Adam Harvey 2017. Yee Haw.
Ivanhoe X-ing, where Big Crocs and 1m+ Barramundi live.
Photo By Murry. From 13S 131E iPhone 12Pro