Word: patentable
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Your story on the 40th birthday party for the ENIAC reminds me of the phenomenal strides made in computer technology in a relatively short period of time [COMPUTERS, Feb. 24]. But unfortunately, in retelling the controversy over the patent, you made John Atanasoff appear as the villain of the piece. The Honeywell-Sperry Rand trial was a lengthy and thorough process, and after reviewing the trial transcript of 20,667 pages, the judge took seven months before handing down a statement that included this sentence: "Eckert and Mauchly did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead...
...guys down the street who've stolen it," says Jim Hemerling, senior vice president of Boston Consulting Group in Shanghai. In the past two years, companies from General Motors to Sony to Cisco have complained about intellectual-property theft. China's State Intellectual Property Office invalidated Pfizer's patent protection on Viagra last summer, arguing that the drug failed to fulfill the novelty requirement under Chinese law. Like many other multinationals, Pfizer is now cautious about expanding its R&D work in China. Unless Beijing gets a grip on "ownership issues," says Anne Stevenson-Yang, director of the U.S. Information...
...Father of Invention In our Milestone on the passing of Andrew Toti [April 11], we mistakenly said the inflatable flotation vest (commonly known as the Mae West) was his invention. Peter Markus, who died in 1973, won the first patent for the inflatable life preserver...
...this happen? When the government is the main business owner, private parties cannot secure their property rights, especially when those properties are easy-to-appropriate intangibles such as brands, trademarks, business processes and ideas, whether they are protected by a foreign patent or not. The problem has been made worse because China emerged as an economic power around the time when information technologies created highways over which ideas could easily traverse the planet. Just as railroads and telegraphs in the mid-19th century made copyright and patent theft commercially important, so the Internet and associated information technologies redefined the market...
...rare attributes raise The Making of a Public Man beyond the category of benign memoir. One is Linowitz's talent for spare, telling portraits. Among them: Chester Carlson, the arthritic, scholarly patent attorney who, in a one-room laboratory behind a beauty parlor in Astoria, Queens, invented the process that made Xerox a name to copy. Linowitz tells how, as the firm's lawyer and later its chairman, he helped Carlson and Joseph Wilson, an impossibly energetic Rochester businessman, launch a product that ended up creating its own demand. The now ubiquitous machine, says Linowitz, "was a case where invention...