Discover more from BIG by Matt Stoller
From a reader.
See what happened with the clever, safer, medicine bottles that Target pharmacies use to have. Easy to read the label, they would stay up in place, color rings to differentiate among the users in a household. CVS bought Target pharmacies, along with the patent for medicine bottles that Target had bought from its inventor. And the first thing they did was to discontinue its use.
I thought about several inventions while I was working for Nielsen and I submitted then to the company’s invention bank. Nielsen had a whole teams of highly experienced lawyers that would make rounds around their offices harvesting ideas from its employees. We would get medals, inventors awards, gift cards, just for them to shelf most of the ideas, spend the money in patenting the ones they thought could either be sold or prevent other companies from using it. And the employees in exchange had to sign draconian NDAs that would refrain them from ever using their own ideas, even if Nielsen hadn’t file a patent for them.
And the patent system has absurd things like paying extra to file it privately, so the public querying the patent database cannot see what is pending until the patent is awarded. All the fees and hurdles one has to go to file for patents put the system beyond the rich of the actual inventors and being held hostage of big companies that have no intention in investing in innovation.
The Subversion of Patents
You know when this started, right? It was the big change in the USPTO under Clinton in 1993. That transformed everything having to do with patents profoundly. We're still living with the consequences.
I used to run the Bright Ideas at one company I worked for. They wanted me to do it because then I would be ineligible for the scheme, which, given that I was quite prolific, saved them money. Then the word came down from on high that we would no longer be paying the standard 10% of cost-savings for two years which has until then been the norm. The idea was that employees should donate their ideas for free out of company loyalty.
From then on, the only messages which we deposited in the Bright Ideas drop boxes were a variety of expletives, rude messages and some rather imaginative and anatomically impossible drawings....