[drewprops]

There was a story in the business section of today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution about a 79 year-old Atlanta area inventor in the middle of a patent dispute. It got my attention in a big way... I'm livid.

I didn't see it online so let me just explain it here using info from the article....

The basic story is that poor old Clyde met with officials with Caterpillar, Inc., a heavy equipment manufacturer, to demonstrate an engine he designed that injects cooled compressed gas into the engine the instant before ignition, a procedure that reduces the creation of NOx gas. Like the stereotypical patent rip-off, the company's officials ended up telling this old man "Thanks but no thanks" whereupon they went on to develop an engine (called the ACERT) that does the exact same thing that his did in very similar ways, going on to sell 400,000 of the engines to date.... even though Bryant held a patent for the idea in 2001.

Three years after Bryant received his patent two of Caterpillar's engineers received 'Inventor of the Year' awards for their design, which was pretty much his design.

So Bryant sued Caterpillar. The corporation, after initial legal setbacks, has responded aggressively with a series of suits in the U.S., Great Britain and Germany, forcing Bryant to abandon the two European patents! With $36 Billion in revenue last year, Caterpillar has demonstrated that it can easily outpace the aged pensioner in court battles at home and abroad. The article explains how Caterpillar was fined about US$1Billion in 1999 for installing devices on their engines designed with the sole purpose of allowing them pass emissions tests, devices that the company would later quietly remove from the engines since they crippled the performance so much. Mercedes-Benz and Deere & Company reported Caterpillar's deception to the EPA.

So, a clean-burning engine was a holy grail at Caterpillar and they had already been shown to resort to illegal means to accomplish their corporate goals.

At stake here is not only the patent rights of the clean-burning engine, but the very way that patent law is considered by the United States Government. There is pressure on our congress to institute a streamlining of our patent law, a measure intended to reduce the number of potential legal snares a company might encounter on the road to an end-product. The tech savvy folks here at AN may be aware of supposed "software" companies that buy up old firms to harvest their patents so that they can sue big software/hardware firms for some arcane use of a 20 year old patent, which is legal, but oh so slimy.

So I'm extremely sympathetic to the argument for reducing patent bloodsuckers... but this push to eliminate the parasites poses a very real threat to innovation at the scale of independent researchers, developers and inventors, especially when the law is wielded with bad intent. Case in point: Clyde Bryant vs Caterpillar.

The most recent development is that the patent investigator (Sheldon Richter) who granted Bryant a continuance for his patent began investigating several thousand pages of documents from Caterpillar. In short order Richter was removed from the case and replaced by a new investigator named Thai-Ba Trieu who announced in May that she was going to reject most of the continuance awarded by Richter, notably all of the portions dealing with diesel engines.

So poor old Clyde Bryant's patent is soon to become public domain and Caterpillar is going to come out smelling like a rose. Remember that the next time you think about inventing something and think about looking into this case on your own. It's really easy to get in touch with your representatives in Washington these days... spread the word if you feel like it.

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[billybobsky]

He made the mistake of not spreading his idea as HIS own before going to caterpillar..

[Banana]

Even so, it's totally wrong that a company should profit off someone else's idea and not compensate him for it.

I've always believed that patent laws would be greatly simplified if it was required to demonstrate that you had financial obligation in patenting (e.g. you actually spent money and has working prototype or component to make it feasible) to combat the patent squatting.

As for Clyde's case, I recall reading a post in a thread about EU's patent system saying one good thing about US Patent system was that it's not the date you file your paperwork but the date you invented something and whenever there is a dispute, the patent office will research to ascertain who came up with X first. That's something that could be strengthened.

[billybobsky]

Again, patent law requires the person whose patent's were violated to have a nearly infinite supply of money OR have an obvious legitimacy to their claims.

This is why individuals working for themselves don't get rich off of patents anymore. And one really has to wonder if the system is even doing anything.