I'm thinking of the 'sawstop' and 'festool domino' woodworking tools here. Which are important innovations that were probably motivated by patents, but whose patents have run long.
The inventor reached out to several saw makers to license his new invention. None of them took it seriously. So he went and started a company with his new patent and became successful. Then other companies (Bosch specifically) tried to rip his tech off after they saw how effective it is, and he got to sue them and win.
Also, their patents are about to or have already expired (https://www.reddit.com/r/Tools/comments/p6bhhb/so_are_the_sa...)
Sounds like the 20 years gave him just enough time to:
1. Attempt to license the product and fail 2. Create a company 3. Market the company / product effectively 4. Exit ( https://www.sawstop.com/news/sawstop-to-be-acquired-by-tts-t... )
And now competition will begin to roll out their similar saws. I think 5 years would've been far too short for him. He would've been squashed. There would've been no motivation for companies to license his tech or buy out his company. They would've just waited 5 measly years and then stomped him.
Now. If this was software, this whole thing would've played out in what? 5 years? 10 tops? So 20 years, to me, seems to be about right for some things. but absolutely TERRIBLE for others.
The bosch system was significantly different. Notably having the advantage of not destroying the blade when triggered. The sawstop patent removed this major innovation from the market. A clear example of stifled innovation.
Moreover, sawstop doesn't sell in Europe, nor license. Which leaves me with no option to make use of this great innovation. Not quite stiffling innovation, but still making the world worse.
With a 5 year patent, sawstop would still have been profitable I believe. But we would have safer tablesaws around the world, we would have systems that don't ruin blades when triggered, and probably have many other innovations on top of that.
Everyone wins: the inventor gets a payday even if he can't deliver directly, consumers don't have to choose between "brand I trust" and "patent-exclusive feature I need", and manufacturers stay out of the courts.
You get the payday, whether it's your one man startup or a massive industrial that actually delivers the product to market.
Note that despite the above, don't buy a tool without those safety features. Better to spend more now and live than get your heirs a pile of money.
It's frustrating because I'd much rather have a proper European sliding table saw like the Robland CZ-300 II, but I don't want to give up the safety of a Sawstop system.
And the lawsuit over it: https://generalpatent.com/professor-s-company-wins-1-6-milli...
> November 26, 2012 - Innovention Toys LLC, a company headed by a Colorado professor named Michael Larson, won its patent infringement lawsuit against MGA, Wal-Mart Stores and Toys "R" Us. A federal jury in New Orleans found that the defendants had infringed Innovention's patent on a strategy board game using lasers and mirrors.
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Back in the days of http://www.gamecabinet.com being one of the primary sources for board games on the web you'll note a search on it: http://www.gamecabinet.com/info/PatentSearch.html
One of the things this let people do is find games that were patented, but never published.
Sid Sackson wrote in A Gamut of Games:
> The files of patents that have been granted are a fruitful hunting ground for forgotten games, although going through these files, as anyone who has ever been involved in a patent search well knows, is a time consuming job. Often the patented games are downright silly, such as a set of dominos made of rubber so that they can double as ink erasers (No. 729,489) or a sliding block puzzle with edible pieces so that a player who despairs of a solution can find collation in gratifying his stomach (No. 1,274,294). Often the patents are repetitious: There are over a thousand different baseball games.
The publishing of a patent maintains the ideas - even if they never got anywhere. If you know how to look, its an archive of decades of board games rules... written in patentease.