Good point, Andy. And I've heard historical examples of how this did happen somewhat that way (at least anecdotally--sometimes these are just good illustrative stories have have diverged from fact). I was told years ago one such case (again, I don't know how factual it is, but it make s a good example): Sugar manufacturers were plagued by moisture causing caking of the product. A guy had an idea, has them sign a contract that they must pay him if they use his idea. Then he attaches a wire to the the assembly line, which causes a small rip in the liner of the packaging, which costs next to nothing but proves to be an excellent way to wick excess moisture away from the product. The company doesn't want to pay for such a simple and (in retrospect) obvious solution, but there is the contract...
But take the example of the game controller feedback. You might imagine the company taking the idea to one of the big console manufacturers. But the company might not be interested--making the controller vibrate when objects collide on the screen might not seem compelling to them. It might be only after they see an existing money-making market that they take notice, and start offering similar controllers as an extra-cost option, above their standard controllers. This is in fact how this played out, and the inventing company had to take the major console manufacturers to court the enforce their patent protection. And here's a real-world example of finding no interest in a product until it's a success: Slicing full hams is a pain--there's a bone to cut around. If you're in a business where you go through a lot of ham, this is a significant problem/cost. A guy set about finding a solution, and it resulted in making a rig where the ham was held and rotated while a reciprocating knife sliced the meat, as their relative position changed slowly from on end of the bone to the other--resulting in spiral slicer ham. The guy thought he had a great invention, and received a patent, but no one was interested. He solved that problem by opening his own ham business--Honey Baked. Spiral-sliced ham became popular. On Jan 29, 2011, at 2:00 PM, Andy Farnell wrote: > > In a way I think this is the more interesting case Nigel, even > though it is less "weighty" than the medical example. > > Were it not for the fact that one look at the > thing would reveal its entirety, the small development > company could always write a contract with the big > distributer. > > In a search for alternatives to patents and paying lawyers $40k > for a process taking years, can't we imagine an "evaluation" > process involving some kind of NDA's, trusted expert agents > acting for both parties? > > a. > > > > On Sat, 29 Jan 2011 13:36:13 -0800 > Nigel Redmon <earle...@earlevel.com> wrote: > >> Now, on the less important-to-society front: A company comes up with an idea >> for tactile feedback in video games. This sort of thing is immediately >> obvious once demonstrated, so trade secrets are of no use. There is nothing >> especially difficult about this technique they developed, but they did come >> up with a really successful application of the idea, because it's cheap to >> implement, is an easy feature for game developers to include support for, >> and game players take to it right away and will pay extra for controllers >> using it. >> >> Video games machines these days are controlled by a few large players, and >> if they want to incorporated this technique themselves, the original >> developing company would get nothing. Of course, some would consider this as >> unimportant, and having nothing to do with progress in the greater sense, >> but others might consider this legally-aided fairness that would otherwise >> probably not play out fairly in the market place. > > -- > Andy Farnell <padawa...@obiwannabe.co.uk> > -- > dupswapdrop -- the music-dsp mailing list and website: > subscription info, FAQ, source code archive, list archive, book reviews, dsp > links > http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/music-dsp > http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp -- dupswapdrop -- the music-dsp mailing list and website: subscription info, FAQ, source code archive, list archive, book reviews, dsp links http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/music-dsp http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp
