From: Brian D Williams (talon57@well.com)
Date: Fri Jul 19 2002 - 12:21:14 MDT
>From: Christian Szegedy <szegedy@or.uni-bonn.de>
>I have two choices:
>1) I keep my idea for myself. (And wait for the (quite
>hypothetical) possibility to turn it into money.)
>2) I give it away for free.
>(Brian chose option 1, I would choose 2)
Actually it's a bit more complicated than this. Under U.S. patent
law anything you come up with belongs by law to the company you are
working for, and for two years after you leave.
I actually submitted this idea to a program (Focus On Revenue) that
was specifically looking for new revenue sources. I was trying to
make the company money.
When it came out later as "privacy manager" I sent all my original
material to the CEO in E-mail since we were applying for a patent
on this idea and since I had suggested it years earlier this could
be used to vindicate apriori claims. He replyed that he would
forward it to the people concerned and that was the last I ever
heard.
>The bottomline is: The current patent laws have two main effects:
>1) Discourage private people to communicate their ideas.
>2) Help the big companies to maintain their monopolies.
>Is it really worth, or even moral?
I would say 1) discourage people from communicating their ideas.
I'll tell another story.
Right after the "call blocking refusal" idea, I was watching the
advancement of high speed data lines, and everybody started talking
about Video-on-demand.
I saw how this wasn't going to happen without some major changes
because it was going to be decades before the bandwidth was there.
But I saw something that it seemed people missed, I thought there
was a market for music-on-demand, and we were just experimenting
with DSL at the time. My idea was that we would have centralized
servers, probably in every C.O. (this was before MP3) and we could
offer this immediately in two formats.
The at home version I called "Personnal Radio Station" and the
commercial version was "The Universal Jukebox". The idea was that
you could litterally have every piece of music ever recorded at
your fingertips. It could be very cheap, because it essentially
turned us instantly into a Neilsen ratings like company, big value
added stuff.
I wrote it all up and submitted it and of course got rejected
again.
A few years latter I saw the Universal Jukebox idea featured in a
QWEST commercial, then MP3 came along and we know the rest.
Brian
Member:
Extropy Institute, www.extropy.org
National Rifle Association, www.nra.org, 1.800.672.3888
SBC/Ameritech Data Center Chicago, IL, Local 134 I.B.E.W
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