Since Ford invented the car, are all car companies, either now or at one point in the past, paying Ford royalties for each car they make? Or is “car” not specific enough, and Ford only had copyrights for like the engine and stuff, and other car companies changed their engines enough to not have to pay Ford?
I ask because I think Sony (or some other company) still owns the copyright for CD’s, since every CD logo I see is the exact same design. They must be getting trillions for it! :eek:
Is the person who invented the microchip or the transistor so filthy rich right now he could have Bill Gates be his butler?
A “car” is not something that can be patented (as mentioned, a copyright is a totally different form of intellectual property). For something to be patented, it must be novel and non-obvious (defined as someone in the industry not being able to immediately come up with the idea). Usually, patents define methods for accomplishing a task. So no, a car is not really a good patentable idea since it’s just too generic.
You’ve got some serious confusion going on between copyrights, patents, and trademarks.
You copyright creative works. Books, stories, TV shows, songs, recordings, movies, poems, paintings, photos, source code, etc. can be copyrighted. If somebody else wants to use a copyrighted work, they must pay a license to the copyright holder. Copyright lasts for a long time, depending on where you are, anywhere from 50 to 100 years after the author’s death. Once that time expires, the work falls into the public domain.
Patents protect certain types of ideas: inventions, processes, formulas, and apparatuses that others haven’t invented yet. Ford did not invent the automobile nor the internal combustion engine, but he did patent a great deal of new inventions and improvements to those products, and anybody who wanted to use his patented inventions in their products would have to pay him a license fee. But patents only last for ten years. Once that time is up, anybody can use that invention for free.
Finally, trademarks are things like brand names and logos which are associated with a product from a particular provider. Ford’s blue oval logo is a trademark. Trademarks can last forever as long as the owner enforces them.
So you can’t copyright a car. You can copyright the design of a car, you can trademark the logos on the hood ornament, and you can patent any new inventions that are in the car.
As for CDs, the CD logo is a trademark of Phillips Sony, which invented the technology. The logo indicates that the entity manufacturing that CD has paid Phillips Sony a license fee to sell their patented invention (the CD and CD player technology.)
To be granted a patent, an invention must be novel and work (I’m oversimplifying, but IANAPL). Lots of inventions are substantive, novel improvements on existing ones. There are probably a zillion patents on engine block design, even though to the casual observer one engine block is pretty much like another. IRRC Amazon patented its One Touch purchase process, after which followed a certain amount of controversy.
The transistor wasn’t invented by some freelancer who became wealthy as a result. The two or three guys who invented the transistor worked for Bell Labs. Although their names went on the patent, Bell Labs legally owned all rights to the invention, and they are the ones who made the big bucks.
I don’t know the story behind the invention of the microchip but as technology becomes more refined, R&D gets lots more expensive and I doubt that was an individual but also someone backed up a big corporation. (The earliest versions were called Integrated Circuits.)
Also remember–historically, inventors are never the guys who get really rich from their inventions. The guys who get rich are the ones who either adapt the invention to something actually useful, or figure out how to sell it to zillions of people. I think one exception might be Dolby, who not only invented a fairly simple way to reduce tape hiss, but figured out how to license it cheaply enough that it was easier to license his invention than develop a novel one that wouldn’t infringe on his patent. So he went for volume.
Edison didn’t invent the light bulb. The idea had been around for a while but he perfected it to make it practical.
Generally licenses fees are around 2-5% of sales. But in this case, the patents for old CD technology have expired. The CD logos are used to show that the technology complies with certain industry standards. The slightly different logos and what they mean are shown here:
License fees for CD-Rs in 2000 were 8.5 cents per disk (a lot more than 2-3%! it was 30-40% of manufacturing costs at the time). In 2006 fees were about 3 cents a disk.
The integrated circuit was invented by one man, and although I’m sure he enjoyed a nice lab to work in, it wasn’t difficult for him to get it working within a few months.
If you work for a big company, you get fucked over. Not only do they own all your ideas that you come up with on company time, often they own all your ideas in any way related to what the company is doing. The patent system is a twisted concept.
I said 2-5% of sales not manufacturing costs. What price did the manufacturer sell them for, since you seem to have first hand knowledge of this, I’m interested in finding out.
Just for your reference:
Patent Royalty Rate Segmentation in Some Technology Sectors by Industry:
Yeah, that’s true. So I guess it’s more like contract law. Or maybe it’s no particular law’s fault, and I should launch into a general rant about the imperfection and inefficiency of the invisible hand in our capitalist system, especially in regards to the labor market.
lamu, that’s an interesting list. I wonder what factors influence it (eg, why the inefficient, price-gouging aerospace industry has such low patent costs). Btw, to make the table look right you can use [code [/code tags.
Actually, I got the numbers from this article. Of retail it was 17-25%. But realize it makes much more sense to compare such things to cost, not to retail prices. I believe that the royalties for bluray drives and disks are (or were) also pretty steep.