Technology – Page 35 – David Bradley

Patently Obvious

Patents guru Greg Aharonian runs the Internet Patent News Service and each year tots up the statistics on software related patents. The numbers several thousand software patents in the USA alone each year.

This, Aharonian posits, means that someone in the patent office thinks that in the early 1990s software developers came up with about 20000 entirely novel, never-been-thought-of-before, totally unobvious software ideas.

So are we likely to see some fantastic new programs in time for Christmas? Aharonian doubts it. The patents all claim one of several common-or-garden ideas: word processor, web browser, e-mail, spreadsheet, database and several others, stuff we have all seen before. The statistics seem to correlate with the size of the industry rather than reflecting innovation. This would point to the fact that either the companies simply ignore other patents in writing theirs or that the examiners are so overworked they cannot check back – or both.

If you happen to have been granted a software patent before the current boom, in 1971 say, when there were only 100, you should get on to your lawyer straightaway, your idea might not make it into the shops for Christmas but you might have a nice little earner suing IBM, Apple, Microsoft et al.

Happy Victoria Day to our Canadian friends, by the way.

Video head cleaner

An engineer friend tells us he was rather heartened to discover that even in the face of
hi-tech problems the young electrical engineer who had come to fix the family video recorder could improvise a low-tech solution to the problem.

Half way through his grandchildren’s viewing of “The Jungle Book” the picture became distorted devastatingly – in the eyes of his grand children, at least. Our friend suspected that an expensive, proprietary head cleaner would be the only answer but having shelled out for said device and found the picture just as bad afterwards he contacted the local repair shop.

He expected the engineer to arrive with an array of tools and equipment and was shocked when, after a quick inspection of the machine, a piece of his cigarette packet was removed, the VCR opened, and the fragment of cardboard scraped across the delicate playback heads.

Biting his tongue for fear of inciting further wanton vandalism, our friend watched as the engineer slotted “The Jungle Book” back into the machine, pressed play and then sat back as the video played perfectly.

For the politically correct, the edge of a business card or stout envelope may work just as well and we’re considering patenting the idea. Just don’t blame us if you b*llox up your machine.

Sex toy

A while ago now, the state of Alabama, USA, passed a noble law making it illegal to sell any device ‘for sexual stimulation of the human genital organs’. In other words if you fancy self-gratification with an appliance of science you’re stuck. The State argued that good vibrations in the bedroom are obscene.
Subsequently, however, six frustrated women went to court in an attempt to get the law overturned on the basis that it violates privacy rights.

The offence carried a $10,000 fine and a jail sentence. But, I wonder, in a country where free expression is so proudly proclaimed, and at a time when serious ethical and moral dilemmas are high on everyone else’s agenda, did Alabama waste taxpayers’ money arguing the toss over dildos?

Illicit CD-ROMs

An Australian chemist friend of mine was giving a lecture recently on how Western chemists might best help their colleagues in the developing world gain access to the mountains of chemical information available without eating into their own budgets too much.

Various systems based around the Web were discussed but industrial delegates were surprisingly more than a little interested in one particular idea concerning CD-ROMs.

My chemist friend planned to set up a cheap subscription service for a monthly CD-ROM that would mirror chemistry sites on the web and so bring the internet to those scientists in poverty-struck institutes with no access. When the queue for samples of the CD-ROM had stretched to the back of the lecture hall my friend asked the next person in line why they were so keen to see the CD-ROM. The startling reply was that their employer was so scared of staff wasting time on the web that all net access was blocked – a CD-ROM could be viewed illicitly without needing a net connection.