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Author Topic: Worthless patents  (Read 8674 times)
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John K5PRO
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« on: April 19, 2008, 01:52:05 PM »

A new one, US#7,355,470 just issued to 3 guys at ParkerVision Inc.
Heres a link to it:
http://tinyurl.com/6ktlyj

This patent is ~171 pages long, over half of it being single diagrams and schematics, one per page. The rest of it is mostly mathematical derivations of various modulations created by techniques such as Chireix outphasing. I cannot figure out what is unique about it, what did their claims cover? I think it was such a massive application that the Patent Office was swamped, and just awarded another number. Obviously, someone thought this was original work.
To me it appears as a poorly organizated regurgitation of everything you wanted to know about high efficiency outphasing transmitter, EER, LINC transmitter topologies. What IS useful is that this patent pretty much lists as references every patent back 50+ years on high efficiency power amplifiers, using these modulation techniques. Its a nice list that by itself gives us a great place to search for the real thang. Finally, it has a huge 'other publications list' which also covers almost everything that has been published in this arena. More bizarre, I found my own name in this list, with a link to an online discussion on the RCA Ampliphase design, "Amplifuzz", on the Amps@contesting.com in 2005.
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KE6DF
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« Reply #1 on: April 19, 2008, 02:23:55 PM »

I'm an inventor on a patent in the computer communications area.

It too is a worthless patent which came out of work I was doing at the company I worked for at the time.

It's owned by the company I worked for, of course.

Why did the company pay the legal expenses and pay for my time working with the lawyers for a patent that is probably not defensible anyway?

It was just to have something to trade if we ever got into a patent dispute with some other company.

You do the old, "I'll license you to use our patents if you license us to use yours" ploy.

I think this is common.

It also looks good to investors to have lots of patents.
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af6im
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AF6IM jumping from a C54G, 1999 Quincy Illinois.


« Reply #2 on: April 20, 2008, 11:30:44 AM »

I have a good perspective on this topic. I have several patents and I also have been a registered patent attorney since 1978. The validity of patents runs the gamut from ridiculously invalid to rock solid. Sometimes you think the patent examiner must have been brain dead to grant patents on inventions that are obvious or have been in the public domain for years. The ultimate irony is that lay juries, not judges and not technically competent experts make the big decisions as to validity where there are factual disputes. This leads to some pretty bizarre results sometimes. One that I will never forget involved the use of fast switched capacitors to perform the equivalent functions of large resistances. It was old hat, used in ICs for many years, but somehow a company had been issued a recent patent on the idea. The patent should have been held invalid and it was, but for the craziest reason. We interviewed the jurors after the verdict and found out the reason they had held it invalid. They couldn't really understand any of the expert witness testimony, so they deferred to the opinion of one of their fellow jurors. He had been in the Army Signal Corps in WW2 and told the other jurors (technically wrong and also against the jury instructions prohibiting jurors from using evidence from outside the trial) that he worked on radios in 1943 that employed this circuit so the patent couldn't possibly be valid.
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NE4AM
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« Reply #3 on: April 23, 2008, 01:03:23 PM »

Holy smokes!  What a snake (oil) pit!  ParkerVision has 80 patents, none worth the trees killed to print them.  Evidently they have soaked quite a few investors:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/56007-nothing-behind-parkervision-s-technology-barron-s
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73 - Dave
John K5PRO
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« Reply #4 on: April 23, 2008, 03:45:37 PM »

Thanks for directing me to the real story of ParkerVision. I routinely ran into the patent I mentioned, while researching links from another patent, on some high efficiency PA. What astounded me was the length, the list of references, and the publications cited, far more than any patent i have seen recently. And the total gibberish and name dropping that permeates Sorrel's patents.

Steve Cripps' review of their vector modulation patent sums it up well:
http://www.pvnotes.com/d2p-patent-analysis

73
John
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John K5PRO
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« Reply #5 on: April 23, 2008, 04:47:32 PM »

The Barron's article on these guys (Jeff Parker and Co) says a lot.
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB119647334993210312.html?mod=googlenews_barrons

What a way to make a buck, though, by short selling their stock at the same time running a website dispelling the myths of Parkervisions technology. PV  basically tried to patent Chiriex Outphasing modulation. It was an elegant invention in its time, and Ampliphase was the name that RCA trademarked in their BC transmitter line in the 1960s. Hard to understand ParkerVisions stuff  - though it seems like a way to sheister investors.
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Bill, KD0HG
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« Reply #6 on: April 24, 2008, 09:54:57 PM »

Hey, John, good reading.
Did you ever get your broadband internet connection working over there?
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k4kyv
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Don
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« Reply #7 on: April 25, 2008, 12:57:32 AM »

Last week I went to see "The Bucket List".  In one of the dialogues at the beginning of the film, the main character gets into a discussion about inventions, and the question was asked, who invented radio.  Naturally, Marconi's name comes up first, but then the main character says no, it was Nikolai Tesla.  Then he goes on to recount the entire story of Tesla vs Marconi, and the supreme court decision revoking Marconi's patent and granting it to Tesla just after his death.  The story as he told it was entirely accurate, and his speech sounded verbatim to one of Jack, W8AHB's famous 75m monologues on the subject of Tesla.
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Don, K4KYV                                       AMI#5
Licensed since 1959 and not happy to be back on AM...    Never got off AM in the first place.

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af6im
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« Reply #8 on: April 25, 2008, 02:05:53 PM »

First, I concede that Tesla was a spectacular genius and made pioneering inventions in inductive devices, robotics, turbines, polyphase AC machinery, etc etc. His worshippers credit him with many inventions that he trumpeted loudly, but never really reduced to practice such as practical wireless power transmssion.

I think Tesla patented radio, but didn't truly invent it. His patent attorney did a great job with what he had to work with, claimed very broadly and filed in 1897, three years ahead of Marconi. If you look what Tesla built, however, it looks like he didn't ever really understand the difference between near field  phenomena and classic Maxwellian EM radiation.

I don't think Tesla ever figured out how to transmit and receive EM radiation over long distances. I have read his patents and I dont see the makings of a Marconi radio within their pages. There are tantalizing hints, but big gaps in a full disclosure of a working radio. Tesla loved spectacular public demonstrations and did them with impressive theatrics. If he could have demonstrated radio, real radio not near field electrostatic parlor tricks, he certainly would have. He was under constant financial pressure and money would have flowed in if he were able to demo trans Atlantic wireless for example.

Tesla was a decent man of incredible intellect whose brilliance is not dimmed much by removing the radio feather from his cap. He deserves respect for what he did invent and he will always have mine.

Asbestos and Nomex in place, let the flames begin.
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WA1GFZ
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« Reply #9 on: April 25, 2008, 02:45:54 PM »

talk about worthless, he has his  plane parked across the field today
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John K5PRO
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« Reply #10 on: April 25, 2008, 05:02:16 PM »

Bill
Yep, I am WIFI, running a lot faster than a modem now. I pay the Indians $25 a month, and they hooked me up with a Motorola Canopy radio on 915 MHz. We put the thing up on my tower at 25 feet. Now I got 5 neighbors interested, so they all got hooked up too. Its the rage here now that there is an alternative to modems. Its about time, 10 years late.

I gotta get that BC1H1 finished, its in the garage in pieces.

Tesla, vs. Macaroni (!), I also am a Tesla fan, but he had his limits, and was certainly a strange character. Talked to pigeons, etc in later life. But then again, don't a lot of people do worse when they are old and decrepit?
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KB2WIG
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« Reply #11 on: April 25, 2008, 10:52:07 PM »

pigeons are fine, with a little white wine
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What? Me worry?
k4kyv
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Don
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« Reply #12 on: April 26, 2008, 06:11:22 PM »

Regarding Tesla vs Marconi and the radio patent, it depends on whether or not the patent was for a long-distance communications system, or for a device to generate the high-frequency alternating current necessary to produce the Hertzian waves used for the communications system.  As I recall the patent involved the transfer of energy between mutually coupled resonant circuits.

Tesla was more a theorist, while Marconi was more a business man who found a commercial use for what had been little more than scientific curiosity.

Radio or no radio, probably Tesla's greatest contribution to humanity was his rotating magnetic field that made possible the induction motor that requires no brushes or commutator.  The significance of that invention has been compared to that of the invention of the wheel.
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Don, K4KYV                                       AMI#5
Licensed since 1959 and not happy to be back on AM...    Never got off AM in the first place.

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This message was typed using the DVORAK keyboard layout.
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