Word: inventor
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...courts have increased the use of juries, which tend to side with plaintiffs and award big monetary damages. Last year a Detroit jury awarded inventor Robert Kearns a $10 million judgment against Ford for violating Kearns' patents on intermittent windshield wipers. A San Francisco jury two months ago ordered Intex Plastics to pay inventor Charles Hall $5 million in damages for violating his patent on the water...
With the cost of litigation soaring -- defending a patent in court can cost ( $250,000 to $2 million -- entrepreneurs are financing lawsuits for inventors in exchange for a piece of future royalties. A New York City company, Refac Technology, has sued more than 2,000 companies, including IBM, Kodak, Sears, Exxon and Sony, on behalf of small inventors. Refac raised more than $3 million from investors to finance a series of suits by Gordon Gould, inventor of the laser, against the likes of AT&T and Xerox. The companies settled. Refac's revenues last year, mainly from royalty fees, exceeded...
Thus begins the latest chapter in the tangled history of GAF. Seized by the U.S. government in 1942 for its links to Nazi Germany's I.G. Farben, infamous inventor of the poison gas used in Hitler's concentration camps, the company was owned by the feds for the next two decades. During the early 1980s, GAF fought a bitter two-year battle in boardrooms, courtrooms and newspaper ads against Heyman's ultimately victorious takeover effort. Since then, in the words of one analyst, "Heyman made a lot of money, and he made a lot of people a lot of money...
...years, groups of scientists have been chasing down an exotic form of carbon believed to have a particularly elegant configuration: 60 atoms of carbon arranged like a miniature soccer ball. The improbably spherical molecules were dubbed buckminsterfulleren es, or simply buckyballs, because they resemble the geodesic domes designed by inventor Buckminster Fuller. Researchers knew that some sort of 60-atom carbon molecule existed, but they had trouble producing enough of the stuff to study its properties or confirm its structure...
...record companies, including Polygram (a Philips subsidiary), have already signed on to make recordings in the new digital compact cassette (DCC) format. Philips says the system will be available in early 1992 and promises it will deliver DAT-quality sound. Experts, however, are dubious. "I think Philips, as the inventor and promoter of the analog cassette, is interested in prolonging its life," says Len Feldman, senior editor of Audio magazine. That's understandable. One quick turn with the DAT Walkman demonstrates that the audio future is here, and well in hand...