[Stoves] RE: genealogy of stoves

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Martin

Thanks for the stimulation.

I am not sure if the genealogy is possible - perhaps for certain stoves it 
could be done.

But...about the patents.  Patents are over-rated.  A patent is a licence to 
sue someone for infringing on the patent.  If you invent something really 
good, people steal it left right and center.  How much of your time are you 
willing to spend in court?

These days there are many patents applied for and issued that are not valid. 
In fact, unless an American court has ruled in favour of a patent's 
validity, people do not generally consider an American patent to be valid. 
To get one 'broken' all you have to do is find that some guy in China made 
an essentially similar device in 1922.  It happens all the time.  I hear it 
costs about $1.8 million to have a patent ruled valid in the USA.

And then look at the guy in Arizona who first put two video machines in the 
same case.  Japan went nutz!  It is so obvious but no one had done it.  They 
hounded and persecuted that man and his little company because they were 
going to have to pay him some fee to make them.  Even now, they are not 
generally available on the market.  If you make something good, they will 
try to bankrupt you and have to sell it to them cheap.

The patenting of 'life forms' by which I mean parts of the genome of people 
is stupid. They are all invalid as you can only patent something you have 
invented, not something found in all living people.  Duh!  What a waste of 
money.

Thus the fears about someone patenting 'your genome' are unfounded and 
mostly serve to scare people into doing something silly, possibly costing 
money.

A lot of stove patents are invalid but no one has challenged them yet.  For 
example a stove might be patented in Mauritius and never tested in court. 
Therefore it is 'valid'.  But that patent might not have made it through the 
Canadian system which checks more carefully.

And even after all that, a patent might be legal in 4 countries but no 
others where it is perfectly legal to knock off the idea with nothing due to 
the real inventor. And after 20 years or so the patent becomes public 
anyway.

It is a jungle out there, and in here!  The best thing to do is to carry on 
doing good work and share what you can with people who also do good work. 
The rest, for the most part, is noise.

Regards from
Crispin