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[Michael Winslow Czeiszperger <michael AT czeiszperger.org>]

On Saturday, December 21, 2002, at 02:20 PM, Diana Duncan wrote:

> Ummmm...does it matter if they existed before?  Isn't it the first 
> person to
> apply for the patent the one who gets it?  I certainly may be wrong, I 
> know
> little of patent law, but I thought you could patent dang near 
> anything, as
> long as you were the first to apply for the patent.

I worked in long range R&D for Yamaha Musical Instruments in the late 
80s/early 90's, and our job was to churn out patents. Well, at least we 
churned out internal Yamaha patent documents which started through the 
Yamaha bureaucracy before being filed in the US and Japan. While not 
experts on patents, we did have to learn enough to have our work easily 
made into patent applications.

One of the requirements is uniqueness of the application of the 
technology. For example, although frequency modulation as a technique 
is old as used in radio, Stanford was able to get a patent on a device 
for musical instruments that used FM to generate music. One reason such 
a patent application could be denied would be if someone else had 
invented it first, which could be proved either with a published 
article, or a product, or even internal notebooks. Each of us had to 
keep internal lab notebooks containing all notes and working documents 
so there would be a documented history of working on the invention.

People have the impression that large corporations go around stealing 
ideas from the small inventor, and after working for at least one large 
corporation I saw that was really untrue. The strange thing is that 
coming up with useful ideas for new musical instruments which are also 
patentable was a lot harder than you would think.

___________________________________________________________________
Ending a sentence with a preposition is nothing to be ashamed of.
        -- michael at czeiszperger dot org, Chapel Hill, NC