Intellectual property and Patents

About 30 years?back I started off as a Franchise of a computer software training center?by name COMPUTER POINT, we paid ROYALTY to the principal company COMPUTER POINT for using their name, ?teaching methods and the physical look of their establishment ( see below a photo of me at ?COMPUTER POINT TRICHY). A royalty is a legally binding payment made to an individual or company for the ongoing use of their assets, including copyrighted works, franchises, and natural resources. Sitting in the thought bar this week is all about Intellectual property.

There are various types of Intellectual property namely Trademarks like NIKE or McDonalds, Copyrights usually attached to an artistic invention like music and patents that goes into the making of a process, machine or a composition that’s unique. A patent in simple English is a certificate given by the Government to the inventor protecting the inventor from others to use his invention. In other words a Patent is the Government telling ?you to share your secret with the government and the government in turn protecting you with a shield?for the next 20 years. During this 20 years it is up to you to go commercialize it, either you do it yourself or sell your patent to an entity and if you do not have the muscle power to make it a business you can agree with commercial establishments to use your secret and get paid a Royalty for it.

The three main factors that makes a thing patentable is its should be NOVEL it should not be existing in the world before you invented it, it should be NON OBVIOUS and it should have a UTILITY. One of the best examples of what is a patent, and its uses are from the drug manufacturers of Covid 19. Usually companies spend a lot of money on the research and once the research is done making the drug may not be expensive but Pharmaceutical companies divide their cost to every dose of drug produced so that they make the money. Patents give makers the rights to their discoveries as well as the means to make more money from them - which is an incentive to encourage innovation.

India had proposed to ?the World Trade Organization (WTO) that the patents on vaccinations and other Covid-related items should be waived. India argued that, given the extreme nature of the pandemic, the recipe for the life-saving jabs should be made widely available so they could be produced locally in bulk by other manufacturers. Pharmaceutical companies argued that by ?waiving patents alone wouldn't solve much. It would, they say, be like handing out a recipe without the ingredients or instructions. The patent covers the bare bones of the blueprint but not the precise production process. That's crucial here. Vaccines of the mRNA type - such as Pfizer and Moderna ?are a new breed and only a small number of people understand how to make them. In short there are only ?35 companies in 12 countries making Pfizer’s Covid drug, something similar to Serum Institute of India?who got the license to manufacture Oxford University/AstraZeneca ?drugs in India.

Companies like IBM. Samsung, Intel , Google are world leaders in patenting, I was surprised to note that APPLE was on the 37Th rank with 20,491 active patents. In India it is the education domain that is leading the patent game and one notable education institute is the SRM Institute of Science and Technology. USA as a country led the patent game by registering the highest number of patents followed by Japan and China and ?India at 22.

Here are some of the people who researched and patented their inventions.

BLUETOOTH . Patent Name: “Peer to peer information exchange for mobile communications devices. Jaap Haartsen invented Bluetooth in 1994, allowing electronic devices in close proximity to connect to each other using low-power, ultra high-frequency radio waves

GPS ( Global Positioning System) Patent name?“Navigation system using satellites and passive ranging techniques” Roger L. Easton was the mastermind behind the Global Positioning System, as he developed technologies in the 1950s for the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) to track U.S. satellites in orbit and of course Soviet satellites too.

You may want to know that the most valued patent in the whole world is the TELEPHONE. ??Alexander Graham Bell ?????( see pic below) was granted a patent that recognized him as the sole inventor of the telephone, US patent no. 174,465, eventually became known as “the single most valuable patent ever issued in the history of the world”.

You may also want to know that?there are patents for ?Device for Treatment of Hiccups, Snore Recording Pillow, Stuffed Toy Pillow with Headphones and ?Smart Phone Scent Diffuser. Here ends my note on Intellectual property.