You are like the guy that said there will be only one computer for each country or whatever. One thing is not being able to guess where progress might come, another thing is denying that it will come.
Lets take a simple made up example. Someone suddenly made a nano carbon fiber tether with 10x the strength per diameter compared to UHWMPE. Then it turns out there is only one way to terminate this specific tether. Patent. BOOM. The «IP cloud» did not mention this method.
Tallak, I am the guy from the place that first implemented or envisioned the IC and cloud computing.
Nano tubes are already ~10x stronger. There never is just one-way to terminate a fiber. You will be able to buy the super-tether with the license-cost included. These are facts, not imaginary risks.
Wisdom of the Old Forum: Kitemill has far greater real risks, like that it may crash on someone.
How is this about Kitemill?
Its about Kitemill even more than its about my (not) being like the “only one computer” guy. I was trying to relate to the real risks you personally face. There is less risk you face blocking IP, thanks to the Old Forum disclosing so much art in public. We did fear Google in particular, would control AWE, but no more. Lets hope Kitemill does not fall in the same high-risk design trap. No blocking IP expected, at least.
Are you sure that there is a decent mirror on the wayback machine? They don’t back up everything. Do you have a backup? I have one.
The makani sea platform seems pretty useful and something that could have been imagined before.
IP is a fresh product. Most useful patents would be based on some recent discovery based on current state of the art. Makani’s floating buoy is a good example of this. One could make a different floating platform, but I suspect the tilting motion has very positive effects on power generation.
If i was looking for prior art, patents and scientific articles would be the place to look. I doubt it would ever be worthwhile to scour old forum posts in an IP trial. The prior art needs to be really detailed to be useful, and I’m not even sure how well «random» internet activity holds up in court. On top of all, the Yahoo forum is no longer publicly available.
Forums are good for sharing information. If you want to store IP i believe well written articles would be a good medium, published by an independent third party.
Most people in this forum are actively patenting. They (we) have different reasons for this. Probably the reasons are not becoming rich or stopping anyone else from doing AWE. Still, these people will noy share any patentable ideas in their discussions. To believe this happens to a large extent would be naive. But I dont think having intentions to patent stuff is a problem for taking part in a forum discussion…
Its always been expected that the entire Net, including Yahoo Groups, would be autonomously data-mined for early AWE content, as industrial or academic interest, or AWE IP legal battles, dictate. Old Forum mirrors exist on Wayback, in Joe’s public archives, and various member email accounts. Its not lost.
A legally enforceable financial monopoly is the primary reason patents exist. Ventures do raise funds from junk patents, and governments skim filing fee revenue, but this was not the original idea. Patent filing is not an ideal format for knowledge sharing, like open academic publishing.
If only patent filers could or would do more public knowledge sharing. They tend to be the least sharing by nature. Of course they are welcome on Forums, for whatever they can add.
Regarding Makani’s patented architecture as blocking IP, or as useful art. The claim for no blocking IP is general. Anyone can still make AWE despite any patent. Makani has patented one of the most marginal schemes imaginable, with many prior-art roots. If only the power-curves were public, it would be clearer that it has already scaled past its sweet-spot, plus it crashes quite often. Then there are all the imitators. They are not paying royalties because the Google patents are junk, and would likely fail in Court challenges.
Finally, the Old Forum has been a repository of known Failure Modes that may have legal liability implications for any player that overlooked or ignored the warnings.
As discussed on the Old Forum, to answer Doug on the same misconceptions, no patent was needed to “invent the wheel”. Patents are not a reliable measure of worth, most are junk, and never even pay back filing costs, or generate ruinous litigation.
Google’s unlimited capacity to fund potentially blocking IP was considered a threat, motivating the Old Forum as the “publication-of-record” to flood new ideas into the public domain beyond what any of us could pay to patent. Lots of our friends did patent great AWE ideas, and some, like Olsen and Bolonkin, licensed to the Open-AWE_IP-Cloud, which finally outstripped Google’s AWE patent war-chest, in quantity and quality.
“Blocking IP” is a real problem in many domains, but not so much in kites, since so many fundamental patents have expired over the last 200yrs, including AWE’s best-ever, USP3987987-
The Old Forum remains the most comprehensive review and analysis of kite and AWE IP.
There’s a lot of mention of the old forum here… Has there ever been a link to any of the old forum content?
It’s a mystery to me how you can praise «the old forum». Right now it is not readable even by those who were previously active contributors. Any IP cloud is only available for a select few who have essentially stolen what information was there.
Could you supply details on how a patent eg by «Bolonkin» was transfered to OpenIP cloud? What I do find on Bolonkin is a Laddermill variant US20030066934A1, the patent is withdrawn… So OpenIP cloud should play no part in sharing that particular idea…
Tallak,
Its easy to praise the Old Forum even as the sands of time take a toll. Like many Yahoo Groups under the latest policy changes, the public content is mirrored in all sorts of ways, from Wayback to various member archives. JoeF is doing what he can to set up a core public archive. The New Forum faces similar issues as it ages.
AWE Patent holders like Bolonkin and Olsen years ago indicated voluntary participation in an AWE Patent Pool by personal email, subject to high-minded conditions publicly documented. All IP Pools going back over a century are subject to litigation or other validations on a case by case basis. At least there is a reasonable legal case that Open AWE has a role against any future competing claims by powerful players like Google.
As for lapsed patents, or weaker CC claims, its up to us as an industry to set up peer-reviewed compensation channels. For examples, we have interacted with Payne’s family, and could honor some value for USP3987987, despite its being lapsed. Similarly, if Doug gives his all in AWE but never realizes any value, we could still support compensation, as social justice. Its an Honor System, and not everyone has to agree for it to work.
If you have ideas how to make this process even better, bring them on.
Well. As far as I’m concerned, an expired patent is free for anyone to use. No payment required. I would think not many serious businesses would voluntarily «give back» like you describe. An expired patent belongs to the public domain, those are simply the rules if the game.
As of just now it does not make business sense to use a patent to block another company. Nor does it make sense relative to global warming. So it does not necessarily bother me that Google has many patents. They are probably just stacking up their best possible defense of their investement in AWE.
I am just putting som doubt on the usefulness of the OpenIP AWE cloud thing. There are quite a few AWE related patents no longer active. Why is this public resource somehow connectee to OpenIP cloud? What use could this possibly have eg for Kitemill? Right now it’s just some really diffuse statements made by you, no added value as I see it
Tallak,
You understand correctly the Honor System dynamic, that its voluntary. Similarly, social justice often depends on voluntary proactive goodwill.
Should KiteMill fail in the market, under the “rules of the game” it imagines, a generous industry compensation culture could still offer its engineers pensions or similar benefits.
True, all IP positions are uncertain. You may not see hidden value now that emerges tangibly in the future. History is our best guide to what is possible, as well as what we undertake to create-
https://spie.org/news/spie-professional-magazine/2009-october/patent-pools?SSO=1
OK now pay attention: Look at “the topic” “Yahoo group moving”. But the real topic has moved to Santos’ emotional problems with patents. So, whomever the anonymous post hiders are, please delete ALL the posts that are off-topic, or stop lying and pretending “off-topic” is why you delete my posts.
The “old forum”, despite its admirable intent, had a few major problems:
I will say THIS about the founders of “the old forum”, and how I slowly learned to deal with their perpetual wrong statements on seemingly any and every topic:
On their “old forum” they kept promoting “Minesto” as more fake-future-news-of-the-future, celebrating the success of “Minesto” ahead of the fact, repeating the public relations nonsense of “They work on jet fighters!” guaranteeing success in underwater kite-flying.
They were promoting “Minesto” (because of their emotional attraction to the word “kite”), to the point that I realized something that pushed me into making a prediction about Minesto, based on a newly-recognized “technical” indictor that had occurred to me:
If the founders of the old forum predicted the success of a certain technology, that, in itself, was a negative indicator. I had been saying I could really see nothing technical preventing success for Minesto, although I also did not see why it should be better than an underwater version of a regular wind turbine, but my “certain negative indictor” for Minesto consisted of nothing more than the fact that these two jokers were promoting it. I realized in a flash one day: If Santos and Faust are promoting it as a good idea, it can only be a bad idea. No further technical analysis is required. The mere fact that they say it is “good”, means it will not work out. I declared publicly at that moment, if these two old-forum founders predict success, it guarantees failure. Minesto will not work out. That based on decade of noting that basically almost everything they said was almost always wrong. So there it is - one more “test case”. They would like us all to forget the thousand previous “test cases” of the veracity of their technical predictions. OK Well fine then just focus on this one prediction, and you will get the same answer as any of the rest of them.
Doug,
Tallak rightly notes that the Old Forum “moving” is relevant to IP claims made there, including pooled patents. Its not off-topic.
No one is always on-topic, just try not to be the least on-topic.
Hats-Off to Joe Faust’s 50-plus years of kite-tech and AWE archiving, editing, and forum hosting! He has just completed the back-up archiving of almost 30,000 of old AWES Forum messages. The Yahoo Forum is now retired, but he will continue accepting posts to archive, so the Old Forum yet lives on. See his Index link below. Point your data-mining bots here-
http://www.energykitesystems.net/AirborneWindEnergy/OldForumArchive.html