Beginning at NYU in Jan 2013 within the context of a Patents Translation course delivered online, this blog seeks to uncover the patents that rock our daily lives....
The Patent Librarian
estimates that sometime near the end of March 2015 the USPTO will be issuing
patent No. 9,000,000, which means
the USPTO has granted that many patents since provisions for a patenting system
were included in Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution in 1789 and the Patent Act of 1790, one year later.
With a staff of 10,000
at the USPTO in Alexandria, a total of 706,533
documents published in 2014, including applications and those patents
granted, across all categories (utility, design and plant).
That’s a lot of inventive
activity, not necessarily all happening in the US, since inventors from abroad
also seek to patent their work in the US.
I am enclosing a copy of the USPTO Dashboard for Jan 2015 Backlogs, that is, all the unexamined patent applications (utility, design, plant and re-issue) waiting for action at the USPTO in Jan 2015, in the amount of 602265 applications.
Ladies and Gentlemen… tonight is the 87th Academy
Awards for cinematographic achievement, a night honoring the stars of cinema…
the OSCARS, held each year in Los Angeles, since 1929! (Circa the
invention of crepe rubber soles….)
Now, please scroll forward…
On June 11, 2015, the EPO Inventor Awards will be held in
Paris this year. This event is the "OSCARS" of invention awards. The European
Patent Organization Inventor Awards, since 2006, is even an event that is in many
ways mapped onto tonight’s OSCAR celebrations.
Inventors are nominated in five major categories: Research,
Industry, SME – Small to Medium-sized Enterprises, Life-time achievement and
non-European countries. The public (you
and I) have an opportunity both nominate inventors, and to vote and select a
sixth, popular inventor award.
However, unlike the gold-plated OSCAR statuette of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards, depicting an art-deco knight
standing on reels of film, with five spokes symbolizing the five original
branches of cinematic achievement for: actors, directors, producers, writers and
technicians, the EPO Inventor Awards’ trophy is a beautifully crafted sail (perhaps further powered by an English pun...).
To highlight the changing
face of innovation, each year, the EPO Awards trophy is produced out of a
different quintessential industrial material, in the country where the awards
are held. For example, last year’s trophy was crafted from German porcelain, by
the Royal Factory of Porcelain in Berlin. And this year in Paris the trophy will
be produced with a different material – yet to be announced.
Images of the EPO Awards sail trophy and the Academy Awards Oscar are included above. And below, a short Youtube video explaining the crafting of the
sail in 2011, when the EPO Inventor Awards were held in Budapest, Hungary.
Indeed, in 2011, the trophy was crafted out of liquid
wood or arboform, a biodegradable bioplastic that uses a wood byproduct called
lignin, in combination with resins and other fibers to make plastic.
Stay tuned to participate and vote for the 2015 EPO inventor
awards, and to discover all the 2015 EPO inventor nominations. These are
usually some of the greatest inventions that have changed the hum of daily life,
industrial life, medicine etc…
And, yes… in the interim, we will also spend a lot of time
highlighting the controversial aspects of the patenting system. Indeed this
system is deeply layered, and no examination of the patenting system is ever complete
without understanding the controversies, or listening to the voices of dissent.
Inventors take creative leaps, called inventive steps! Artists
also leap, and are creative by definition, so what’s the difference?
Below, inventors as perceived by the inventors themselves, in a
community of inventors at the occasion of the 2011 EPO (European Patent
Organisation) awards in Budapest, Hungary:
And below, a link to a GoogleDoodle post by Mark Holmes, a Google, Inc.; in house artist explaining how he designed the February 18 2015,
Google Doodle celebrating Alessandro Volta
We will be examining in great details what is involved in
the disclosure of an invention, working backwards to what counts as an
invention, so that these differences will become even more substantiated.
Check out today's Google Doodle at www.google.com (and click on the Doodle)! Today's Google Doodle celebrates Alessandro Volta's 270th birthday on Feb. 18, 1745, the inventor of the voltaic pile (i.e.;battery)!
Google Doodles are the delightful and beautifully crafted daily changes to the Google logo posted on the Google.com splash search page. For an archive of the Doodles, search for GoogleDoodles. Perhaps that one day there might be a Google Doodle exhibit to light up MOMAs worldwide! This is charming, whimsical, highly technical and amazingly participatory art!
Google’s Doodle is linked to
a Wikipedia article about Alessandro Volta. In the article you will find out
that Volta’s invention was reported to The Royal Society in 1880, and then to
the Institut de France, two of the oldest learned societies on record, founded
respectively in 1660 and 1795, where the invention was granted Letters patent.
In the Wikipedia article,
you will also learn that Alessandro Volta’s invention concerned the production
of electricity using a chemical reaction at a time when electricity was thought
to be produced exclusively by living beings, according to Galvani’s “frog leg”
experiments identifying animal electricity. Volta’s pile or battery placed two metals
in contact with a liquid electrolyte (sulfuric acid mixed with water, or soaked
saltwater brine paper), creating a voltaic cell where electricity flows as
result of a series of electrochemical transfers and reactions.
You will also find out that Alessandro Volta is credited with the discovery of methane, and subsequently the study of electrical capacitance
where his experiments resulted in Volta’s law of capacitance, and electrical
potential became known as the “volt”. This work in experimental physics was
carried out at the University of Pavia, in Italy where Alessandro Volta was chair and professor for
40 years.
Below, today's animated Google Doodle celebrating Alessandro Volta's sparks of genius
Below a runic carving of King Harald 1 “Blåtand” (Bluetooth) Gormsøn, holding a laptop and cell phone!
And the Bluetooth® logo consisting of the two letter symbols, or runes, of the runic alphabet representing ‘Hagall’ or “H” for “Harald”, and ‘Bjarkan’ or “B” for “Blåtand” (meaning Bluetooth in Old Norse), developed by a marketing design firm.
References
Introduction
to Bluetooth Technology, its Working and its Applications
Cables
begone! Bluetooth® technology is electronic engineering at its best, and Viking
history re-visited on a global level!
Bluetooth® wireless
communication technology, assigned to the Swedish company Ericsson, enables
your Bluetooth®-supported devices to communicate wirelessly and securely with
each other at short distances (< 100 meters or 328 feet).
Bluetooth®
technology is also used for wireless communication of data (music, voice,
photo, video) among billions of other paired Bluetooth® supported products (even
toothbrushes or forks), including medical devices for robotic prostheses and
surgery.
According to one of
the inventors, Jaap Haartsen, the name Bluetooth® is a translated eponym that
refers back to the Scandinavian Vikings, and King Harald I of Denmark whose
epithet was “Blåtand” (blåtand meaning blue-tooth in Old Norse). King Harald I “Blåtand”
Gormsøn was a Danish monarch with a reputation of resorting to diplomacy instead
of the sword, having succeeded in uniting all the tribes of Denmark, and Norway
for a while, during the tenth century AD.
This is also the
reason why the Bluetooth® logo was selected as representing King Harald I “Blåtand”’s
initials inscribed in runic letter symbols. Runic alphabets were used for
Germanic languages, including Old Norse, before the advent of Latin letter
symbols.
Thus, it is in this Viking spirit of peaceful unity that Bluetooth®
technology was named, itself for the purposes of connecting (i.e.; uniting)
disparate devices at short distances, and consequently expanding the potential
of existing means of communication while supplying connection to everyday
objects.
Bluetooth® technology
uses miniaturized radio transmitter technology to exchange data within the un-licensed
Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) frequency
bandwidth at 2.4 to 2.485 GHz. The invention uses the principle of a “spread-spectrum,
full-duplex, frequency-hopping signal”
at the rate of 16,000 hops per second to avoid interference from static and
non-hopping ISM networks such as WIFI in the vicinity of a piconet,
dynamically created when Bluetooth® devices connect. Data is exchanged within a WPAN (Wireless Personal Area Network) also called a piconet or “bubble” at distances shorter
than 100 meters or 328 feet, comprising at least one master device and a
maximum seven actively connected “slaves”.
The
PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) patent that recites the Bluetooth® invention, WO9949593 titled A communication device and method for
operation of long-range and short-range radio was awarded in 1999. The
invention includes both hardware and software (i.e.; device and method), as it
includes the radio transmitter and the connection protocol, the finer details of
which are left to electronic engineers to appreciate.
Below,
the Abstract for WO9949593 titled A communication device and method for
operation of long-range and short-range radio, and an EPO YouTube video of
the story of Bluetooth® told by Jaap Hartsen, one of the inventors, are both included.
A short-range radio transmitter of a
communication device comprising a short-range radio and a long-range radio is
controlled to delay packets which are scheduled to be transmitted at the same
time as a long-range transmitter of the long-range radio commences or
discontinues to transmit. A frequency synthesizer of the short-range radio is
thereby not affected by a change in the power supply voltage which otherwise
occurs at these moments due to transmission with high power by the long-range
transmitter.AbstractWO9949593
Today is V-Day 2015 – A global
movement to end violence against women and girls, that is, a movement targeting
rape, incest, female genital mutilation (FGM), and sex slavery, arising out of
Eve Ensler’s famous play The Vagina Monologues.
The V-Day non-profit organization
was founded, in 1998, in NYC, following a benefit performance of the play that
raised 250,000 USD in a single evening!
The rest is history! Every year,
performances of the play are staged on February 14th, with proceeds
benefitting shelters, and anti-violence programs, for women and girls,
survivors of violence. The organization has raised more than 100 million USD,
in 200 countries, in 48 languages, benefitting more than 13,000 organizations
against violence –using the play (Royalty free) and other creative and artistic
performances as a catalyst for action and organization.
In 2015, the VDay movement includes
a dance, drum and rise movement launched in 2003: The One Billion Rising
-- 4 Revolution, 4Justice, 4Women’s Rights, depending on location, in the bid
to stop violence again women and girls, and through them, the harshest inequities
of the world. The One Billion number
stands for a shocking statistic:one billion women will experience violence
in the world during their life time, that is, 1 in 3 women worldwide.
Check out your local area for events
to break the chain of violence, to Dance! Drum! and Rise! Below, the official video of the
One Billion Rising song and choreography performed worldwide that will perhaps inspire you! Maldives (official) http://youtu.be/F2uTqLQVFko And One Billion Rising around the
world..… !!....
Do your kids love ice-cream? Do they love playing ball?
If they do… (on both counts), and would rather avoid cranking frozen
desserts, then you will all delight in the toy ball ice-cream maker, marketed as the
Play & Freeze™!
Just fill the central container of the ball with frozen dessert
ingredients (in the right proportions), and the outer container with ice and rock salt. Then let
your kids play with the ball for 20 minutes, during which the ice cream will
freeze… Then…enjoy the dessert!
The principle of the toy ball ice cream maker restores the “old fashioned
process” of making home-made ice-cream, lost to modern motor-driven appliances
and refrigeration, without the tedium and labor of hand cranking. Indeed, this
dessert is fun to make, from start to finish!
The patent US5857351 (A) titled Play ball ice-cream maker recites this
invention in the most elegant patent style. Beyond process and play, the
invention is presented with health and educational benefits. The health
benefits recited include the possibility of making ice-cream with healthy
low-fat ingredients, devoid of additives and preservatives. The educational benefits
invoked are those of reflection on the scientific process of rock salt ice interactions with ingredients, and
the details of healthy nutrition, in the fun-filled process of playing ball.
The double compartment of the ball is
described succinctly below, in the Abstract
for US US5857351 (A), titled Play ball ice-cream maker. A patent
drawing of the ball is also included, and above the image of the marketed Play
& Freeze™ ice cream maker.
A toy ice cream maker being a preferably aluminum can with a lid
insertable into a larger container wherein the larger container is encased in a
spherical foam jacket. The smaller can has a lid and the larger can has a lid
providing that ingredients for a frozen dessert may be inserted into the inner
container and a mixture of rock salt and ice is insertable in the space between
the inner and outer can. Another lid, formed integrally with the jacket seals
the ice and rock salt in position. After the dessert ingredients have been
sealed in the inner container and the rock-salt and ice have been sealed in the
cooling container, the device, being a soft ball, is a toy that children
delight in rolling around thereby hastening congealing the ingredients to form
the dessert. Abstract US5857351
The Squatchi Inc. patent, USD704080 S1, titled Home
shoe-sizer for children is a design
patent. (You probably noticed the letter “D” in the patent reference
number).
A design patent protects the way an object “looks”, it’s visual and
ornamental properties. In contrast, a utility patent protects the
functionality of an object, how it works or how it is used. It follows that
objects can be protected with both design and utility patents providing all
conditions of patentability are
fulfilled in each case -- even for a single object like several of Frank
Ghery’s chairs (see this previous post on the differences between design and utility patents).
For the present case of a shoe-sizer, such
an object may be protected for the way it looks, like the brightly colored
Squatchi, designed for use at home to measure children’s shoe sizes. And a shoe-sizer
may be patented for the functions it performs like the Shoe-sizer patent
US1252920 A that was granted in 1918, for all the patentable
improvements that it offered, in particular a sliding block to improve
measurement accuracy.
There are many additional important
differences between utility and design patents, outlined in the Code of
Federal Regulations CFR 37, especially in terms of form. For example, a design patent only contains figure drawings and a single claim,
whereas utility patents contain a
much more detailed and structured description of the invention, that may run
several hundred pages.
Below, to the left, you will find a Squatchi USD704080 S1 patent
drawing, and above an image of the real marketed product. The figure drawings of patent US1252920 titled Shoe-sizer, granted 1918….with its
block slide for more accurate measurements are included below to the right. The image of marketed block slide shoe sizer is also included above.
Just short of 100 years between the Squatchi and the block-slide shoe sizer!...
You
are going to steal your kid’s GRUSH! This is a Bluetooth®--enabled (no pun
intended), motion-sensing toothbrush, that enables kids to visualize the
effectiveness of brushing their teeth using interactive games that coach them
into brushing in all the right places, for the right amount of time, and at the
right time, twice every day! Additionally, for very thorough parenting styles..
the GRUSH app also gives parents a full dashboard report of their children's
teeth brushing activity using a GRUSH score of brushing consistency and
technique…!
Kids can see how they brush
on the small animated screen of a Bluetooth-connected device such as a tablette or smartphone, and are coached
to brush “30 seconds for every quadrant, with proper brush angle towards the
gumline” all within the context of an interactive game where “every stroke is
counted and rewarded”!Monster
Chase,Toothy
OrchestraandBrush a Petare the three games that
provide the interactive coaching and feedback for brushing.
The patent applicationUS 2003001787titledToothbrush with electronic
game apparatusrecites
this invention in broken English. In addition to the standard Bluetooth®-, motion
sensing, connected toothbrush (manual or electric) and the apps for the
interactive game, there are provisions in the patent for communication among
family member toothbrushes! So, at some point in the future, you may no longer
have to steal your kid’s GRUSH for the GRUSH experience of interactive brushing
feedback on screen!
A pediatricdentist on staff at GRUSH appears to
have endorsed this invention, claiming that it is sure to motivate kids to
brush their teeth. Although admittedly, your kid will be the judge! Otherwise, in its manually-operated
version, the GRUSH will certainly have to compete with all the electric
toothbrushes for kids, already on the market. Equipped with highly patented
pulsating, oscillating and/or rotating tufts (e.g.;US20120227201) designed to remove
plaque and clean teeth in ways that exceed what can be achieved with manual
brushing, electric toothbrushes have already accumulated irrefutable data
(e.g.;Klukowska
et al. 2009; Bartizek and Biesbrock 2002). Additionally, the use of a
rotary or rotary-oscillating electric toothbrush with proactive manual rotary
or vertical strokes appears counterproductive (US2014230169,[0002]), so the GRUSH motion-sensing
and coaching for manual brushing would have to be re-programmed for an electric
version of the GRUSH to prevent the use of counterproductive manual techniques
with an electric toothbrush.
Below you will find the stylistically wanting
abstract forUS 2003001787titledToothbrush with electronic game apparatus, and a patent figure. And
above an image of the “soon to be ” marketed product! You can pre-orderhere(for
59$). The GRUSH will ship sometime during Q1 2015. The GRUSH is designed for
kids as young as three.
“Toothbrush with electronic-game apparatus”,
as its alias “gamebrush”, has an electronic-gamer combined and turns boring
daily tooth-cleaning into charming electronic-games. The toothbrush can detect
what time user brush his teeth and for how long, it requests user do
tooth-cleaning upon a regular daily timetable, morning and evening, twice a
day. A good oral-care habit is the key factor for user to win in the
electronic-game. The game model can be vast of kinds. Thetoothbrush use
charming games to “bind” user with a regular daily timetable of tooth-cleaning.
It encourages those people without good oral-care habit, especially kids and
youngster, brush their teeth regularly. At the meantime, tooth-cleaning history
records can be stored in the electronic-game IC chip, so user can check this
history record. An advanced model of this toothbrush can communicate with each
other and invert its game into multi-player model, another advanced model of
this invention allows these toothbrush can speak with each other by voice, for
example in a family pack son's toothbrush can speak with dad's toothbrushby
voice, just like conversations between real family members. To contact inventor
for licensing or other opportunities, please send email to:
bizants_jeff@hotmail.com
References
Bartizek,
R. D. & A. R. Biesbrock (2002) Dental plaque removal efficacy of a
battery-powered toothbrush vs. a control Japanese manual toothbrush. Am.
J. Dent. Sept, 15, Spec. No 33A-36A. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12512990
Klukowska,
M.A., Timm, H., Grender, J., Rooney, J., and A, Biesbrock (2009)
Plaque removal by battery-powered toothbrush and manual toothbrush.
Research presented at the 87thsession of the IADR (Indian
Academy of Restorative Dentistry), April 1-14, 2009, in Miami, FL. http://www.dentalcare.com/media/en-US/research_db/pdf/Page31_2580.pdf
So you have pets,
and when you leave’m at home to go to work, Fluffy chews on your favorite shoes,
Tiger gets anxious, and both become couch potatoes; the pet sitter only comes in
for an hour, the TV and the radio are hardly interactive, and the webcam makes
you nervous, and sends you rushing home every time you see trouble on the
screen.
In comes the
Petcube camera, connected to your mobile device, which also allows you to talk
to your furry friends and to play with them, remotely! Yes, there is a laser light pointer that you
can drag on screen to give your pets some exercise, from a distance! The app
also enables you to extract shots of your pets to send them to your friends!
The patent
application that discloses the Petcub invention is US2014233906, titled Remote
interaction device. The application discloses a device that includes “ a
video recorder, an acoustic transducer, a microphone, an antenna for
transmitting and receiving data, a processor, a photonic emission device and
photonic emission aiming device, and a power supply.” The photonic emission
component is a laser light pointer, which you can remotely control. The video
camera includes a wide angle (138°) lens to capture the whole room, especially
when the Petcube is positioned at a height.
Below,
appears the abstract for US2014233906, titled Remote interaction device, with one of the patent figure drawings; and above there are two images of the marketed product with satisfied
furry customers.
Systems,
devices, and methods are provided for remote interaction with a subject in an
environment. The device has audio-visual recording and transmitting
functionality to provide an operator at a remote location with an audio-visual
feed of the environment near the device. The device also has a light emission
component which the operator controls and which projects light onto a surface
in the environment in the vicinity of the device. The systems, devices, and
methods provide operators with the ability to interact with pets and provide
exercise and stimulation to pets when their owners are away.
Hot, hot, hot! A
second batch of this device is scheduled to roll out this month!
