Silvergrain article on HC110

rob champagne said:

patents exist solely to protect economic adavantage.

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Hmmm, actually patents exist to ensure the disemination of information. That's why it is called a patent disclosure. When filing for a patent you are disclosing ostensibly proprietary information. In return, and as an incentive, the governments of the many countries that honor intellectual propoerty rights grant the patent holder some temporary economic advantage.

BradS said:

Hmmm, actually patents exist to ensure the disemination of information. That's why it is called a patent disclosure. When filing for a patent you are disclosing ostensibly proprietary information. In return, and as an incentive, the governments of the many countries that honor intellectual propoerty rights grant the patent holder some temporary economic advantage.

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Oh yeah, and just how many people do you think would pay to take out a patent if the govt didn't "grant the patent holder some temporary economic advantage"? Do you think they really want to disseminate their intellectual property if they didn't have to? It's a legalised protection racket. You give us money and we'll protect you for 20 years or whatever the period is. Pure and simple.
Serious scientists publish their work for dissemination in scientific publications. They don't take out patents unless they intend to make money from it or want to stop others from using it. Wake up, the wording as you perceive it, makes it sound terribly nice but it is protectionism pure and simple.

Guys;

Trade secrets are more important than any of these. Then there are patents for protection, and then there are Research Disclosures and Defensive Publications meant to keep others from patenting a valuable idea you don't want to pursue.

After the fact, the serious scientist then writes a publication on the latter 3 (but not on trade secrets) and/or delivers a talk at a major symposium.

PE

CRhymer said:

I would post some scans of the negs., but I never back up my claims with evidence.

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ROTFLMAO!

rob champagne said:

The developer manufacturers file patent after patent not for the purpose of producing better developers, but rather as a means to deny their competitors from using the latest discovered chemicals and techniques. Most patents are competitor stoppers and never come to manufacture.

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Rob, new developers don't grow on trees. Developer chemicals aren't "discovered", they're invented -- and they aren't invented in academia, but in the research labs of Kodak, Ilford, etc. Are you proposing that the R&D findings of company A be made available to company B for commercial exploitation if company A decides not to use them immediately in a product?

And I'm not saying all science is worthless, but I would say that most science is only of worth to minority interest groups and that a lot of science is only of worth to scientists because thats what they are into.

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That's true to some extent, but the problem is that it's really hard to determine the worth of scientific research, even if you're engaged in it yourself. Many life-saving drugs in use today are prepared on massive scales using chemistry invented 20-30 years ago that, at the time, seemed esoteric and worthy of your "that's what they are into" comment.

Oh yeah, and just how many people do you think would pay to take out a patent if the govt didn't "grant the patent holder some temporary economic advantage"? Do you think they really want to disseminate their intellectual property if they didn't have to? It's a legalised protection racket. You give us money and we'll protect you for 20 years or whatever the period is. Pure and simple.

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The 20-year commercial protection comes in exchange for a description of how the invention is constructed and/or how it works. Otherwise, why would the government ask for such detailed documents and make them freely available to everyone to read? The description of the invention and how to reproduce it is the valuable part of the patent, for the government. If it turns out to be flawed (i.e. procedures in the patent don't give the stated result) the patent is invalid.

No-one has to reveal their intellectual property if they don't want to. If you don't file a patent, you don't have to reveal your procedures, and you instead have a trade secret. However, if someone figures out your secret, you get no patent protection.

Serious scientists publish their work for dissemination in scientific publications. They don't take out patents unless they intend to make money from it or want to stop others from using it. Wake up, the wording as you perceive it, makes it sound terribly nice but it is protectionism pure and simple.

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It doesn't have to be either/or. A lot of academic research groups apply for patents these days, before publishing publishing their work in journals. If the work gets licensed, the academic department gets a revenue stream that can fund further research or other activities. I know of a few examples of this in major US research universities.

Academic and industrial R&D is expensive. In my field of research (chemistry) top-flight academic research groups in the USA (20-30 grad students and post-docs, headed by a single professor) can easily consume $10M per year in research funding for materials, equipment, salaries, and overhead. Industry has an even bigger R&D cost because it takes a lot of time and work to make a product robust enough for mass manufacturing and sale. I don't know what it costs to bring a developer like HC-110 to market, but Kodak, Ilford, and Fuji will NOT do this kind of expensive R&D without some kind of promise that their intellectual property will not be co-opted by a third party before they've had a chance to make any money.

Whether the new developers patented and sold by Kodak and others are "better" than older ones, or more suitable for a particular photographer, is ultimately up to the customer (the photographer) to decide.

My $0.02.

The scientific community has to get its money upfront for research and they've become pretty good at making all sorts of wild claims about how their research will benefit mankind. If I could take them at their word, then electricity would be free, robots would be doing all manual labour jobs, there would be no illness or disease in the world, any injury could be repaired with better artificial limbs, computers would be smarter than people (that may be true for some people), there would be no starvation in the world etc etc etc. Or to put it mildly, the scientific community is full of S**T when it comes to getting funding for itself. Why should I beleive they are not full of S**T about anything else.

Rob, you gotta quit reading Popular Mechanics... And you forgot "a helicopter in every garage" on your rant list.

So far as I know, if there is a government fee for obtaining a patent, it is very small. You do not even have to be represented by a patent lawyer. If you do hire one its work is done before the patent is applied for.

Kirk Keyes said:

Rob, you gotta quit reading Popular Mechanics... And you forgot "a helicopter in every garage" on your rant list.

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"a helicopter in every garage", that's very 1900's, it's a teleport machine now!

rob champagne said:

"a helicopter in every garage", that's very 1900's, it's a teleport machine now!

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Some of us are Way Beyond the Teleport System.

rob champagne said:

"a helicopter in every garage", that's very 1900's, it's a teleport machine now!

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I think you might like this t-shirt (shame they're sold out)

gainer said:

So far as I know, if there is a government fee for obtaining a patent, it is very small. You do not even have to be represented by a patent lawyer. If you do hire one its work is done before the patent is applied for.

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Schedule of fees:

Dead Link Removed

I prepared all of the text for my patent application in my previous company, and then our patent lawyer had his hand in it to make it acceptable to the patent office. When I read what was actually filed, I cannot recognize my own invention.

gainer said:

So far as I know, if there is a government fee for obtaining a patent, it is very small. You do not even have to be represented by a patent lawyer. If you do hire one its work is done before the patent is applied for.

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Patrick;

There is an application fee and a yearly maintenance fee on patents. That is why unused patents are often abandoned such as the one for Kodachrome. No one wants to make Kodachrome compatible films and so the patent was abandoned.

Well, thats what I get for reading in order, a duplicate post. I'll leave this in due to the Kodachrome story.

PE

Ray Rogers said:

Some of us are Way Beyond the Teleport System.

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"turn on, tune in, drop out"

Lemme get this.
You spend thousands, no more than that, and perfect a really cool thing- a mousetrap say.
So you start to produce it and lean back to recoup your costs, and make a [horrors] profit (so you can do more inventing) And oh yeah, you hire some folks to make them, thereby improving the local economy etc.
but some RAT bastid runs off on a plane/bus/bicycle to (fill city, state or country name in here) and COPIES IT!!, making it without those pesky development costs, and no thanks to you. You are now bankrupt with no hope of recovering all that time/money you invested, so you tell your friends to not bother inventing etc and get a job with the gummint so you can bitch about "big corporations".
No, sorry, I don't get it.

rob champagne said:

Oh yeah, and just how many people do you think would pay to take out a patent if the govt didn't "grant the patent holder some temporary economic advantage"? Do you think they really want to disseminate their intellectual property if they didn't have to?

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Well sportsfans and E Workman;

That is what happened with C41 and E6 processing chemistry. Fuji and Agfa made films that were compatible after EK did all of the work on the process. Since they did not have to do any process development, only film work, the Kodak film and chemistry is more expensive due to amortization of costs. So, now people complain about Kodak costs for film and chemistry. But, that is what happens when something is not patentable. C41 and E6 were not patentable processes!

The films were patentable and so the first products from Fuji and Agfa were inferior but lots less expensive. When the patents ran out, then their products took a quantum leap in quality.

Right now, Kodak films are covering the costs of the 17 or so years that it took to develop and implement good 2 electron sensitization.

PE

rob champagne said:

"turn on, tune in, drop out"

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That would have been Dr. Timothy Leary speaking.
Dr. Hofmann was much more eloquent.

eworkman said:

Lemme get this.
...hope of recovering all that time/money you invested, so you tell your friends to not bother inventing etc and get a job with the gummint so you can bitch about "big corporations".
No, sorry, I don't get it.

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Sounds good in theory. However, what happens in practice with the current US patent system is quite different.