Energy Solution

[Giant Communist Robot]

patent applied for linkie

.....and everyone laughed when I proposed perpetual motion!

[Shapley]

Isn't that what Ayn Rand wrote about in Atlas Shrugged?

[BigJon]

Free power from magnetic force has been debunked time and time again, but the siren call is just too seductive and these scam companies pop up over and over.

I love this quote from that page:

How We Might Increase the Odds of Human Life Surviving Beyond 2050

[navneeth]

I don't know, I think I'll stay with the free energy technology from Steorn.

[BigJon]

Ooo, that's a good scam!

[piqaboo]

Gotta love this statement (italics mine)

Our technology has been independently validated by engineers and scientists - always off the record, always proven to work

[barfle]

Just so's you don't go thinking that the Patent Office has gone as nuts as Mr. Gunderson, the document they linked to is what's called a Pre-Grant Publication. It is NOT a patent. In fact, it has not been examined by a Patent Examiner (which I am, but not in that technology).

The patent office does very little evaluation of the viability of an invention. For the most part, we issue a patent to the first person who files an application for a new idea. However, perpetual motion machines are subject to the requirement of a demonstration to one knowledgable in the art (who would be the Examiner). This isn't one of those, though. If you look at paragraph 0044 of the application, it shows that the permanent magnets get demagnetized through use, for which another patent already exists, and this one will undoubtedly be rejected on prior art (which means the applicant is not the first to invent.)

[Selma in Sandy Eggo]

All of this reminds me - have we heard anything lately about cold fusion?

And how do I get to be a compensated off-the-record confidential technology evaluator? Mr. Gunderson needs me, he does, he does!

[barfle]

You might believe that a patent should be written in clearly understood language, but if that were the case, I wouldn't be making the big bucks.

It is wise to write your patent so it encompasses as many variables and unknowns as you can get away with. Case in point, I once worked for a company that had a patent on a device that would fast wind a videocassette to a selected position and play from that point to another point. (patent number 4,224,644). It was useful for product presentations, interactive training, and video juke boxes. Panasonic tried to get away with doing the same thing, but they sued and got royalties.

Then came the video disk, and someone tried the same idea with it. They sued, but since the patent was explicitly written to cover video tape, it was not valid when applied against a video disk. The video disk had a major advantage over the tape when it came to accessing the location of the program quickly, and the enterprise folded, my job along with it.

If the patent had been written so it claimed a "video recording medium," which includes disks, instead of "video tape," they would be getting royalties from every DVD sold with a menu and chapters. And I would still be living in California, expecting a tidy retirement from a going concern.