So far, we've been looking at more aesthetic things, art, artistic things.
It gets a bit more technical now. Patents.
What a patents form. Well, they're basically related to industrial inventions.
They're not directed to artistic things. They've got to be something that's capable of industrial application,
something that's can be used in industry and industry here can have quite a broad definition.
It could cover agriculture, whatever, but it's got to be useful.
Among the most important things is that it's got to be novel. It's got to be new.
And the derivation of this is probably historical.
Way back three or 400 years ago, the crown, the King and Britain rewarded people who introduced new methods of manufacture.
And it didn't matter where they got them from. If they stole them from somebody initially, that was fine.
But it was encouragement to industry to say, if you bring in some new efficient manufacturing technique,
I think one of them was the ability to make stained glass windows, for example.
If you do that, you will reward you and will reward you by giving you a monopoly.
And a monopoly means that only you can use this for a particular period of time.
That is the origin of this, but it has to be new.
You don't get rewarded if it's not new. Secondly, it has to be inventive.
Now, this might sound very simple. Inventive.
Everybody knows that invention is.
But if you look back in the through the law cases, you'll find going back a hundred years, people have argued again and again what we mean by that.
Another way of saying it is the invention must not be obvious.
And the principle behind this is that you should not be able to get patent protection for something that is not new.
Nor should you get protection for something that, although it's new, is something that ordinary people would want to do, would think of doing it.
So it's not just what has been done.
It's what obviously would be the next step.
And as I say, it's got to be have an industrial application and it doesn't apply to certain things I specifically excluded.
And we'll come up to those in a second. How did you get a patent?
Well, you don't get a patent from just sitting around hoping for it to arrive through letterbox.
You'll have to file an application to a patent office, and there are different routes of doing this.
If you want to get pretty broad territorial protection,
you make a filing at the European Patent Office that will give you protection throughout Europe.
You file a national patent and you also get you get a 12 month period to make applications elsewhere in the world.
And those applications can be backdated by so.
Some choice you can't do. You don't just write and say, Can I have a patent?
Part of the deal is you have to explain how the invention works.
So you have to specification which sets out in detail how to carry out the invention.
And the point of this is that. It's a deal.
The crown says you're going to get the state says you can have protection for a period of 20 years.
But at the end of that 20 year period, other people have to be able to carry out the invention.
And the way we enable that to happen is for you to tell people how to do it.
And that's what the specification should do. If you don't tell people how to do it, you may have problems.
So although you've told people how to do it. They can't do it for the first 20 years.
And after that. But after that, it's open. It becomes part of the public domain.
The other thing, which is very important at the end of this patent specification.
I think it's called claims. And these are very short paragraphs or maybe not always that short.
And they have to say what it is that is covered by the plan.
What is it that you can't do? And basically, I mean, if we have a patent going back some years for a a ballpoint pen,
it would probably say a writing implement containing ink with with an end,
which has a small ball in it, which enables the ink to be transferred to the paper or something like that.
Now, that is not the patent, but that's the sort of thing you expect to be in a claim.
You expect it to say. What is it that can't be done?
Now, as I say, some things can't be patented at all.
Computer programs can't be patented. People have tried very hard to patent computer programs with varying success.
The usual way people do it is they pretend it's something else, which is enabled by a computer program.
But if you have a simple program, you can't say, I patent word, you know, Microsoft Word.
I could they could Microsoft could patent that in Europe anyway.
You're not allowed to pattern business methods. You know, I mean,
I think recently we had a lot of discussion in the press about Tesco having a system whereby you put products
at the end of the aisles of the supermarket where and in doing that you could get more sales for that product.
And they obviously did a deal where people got allowed to put their products or
their products were put at the end of the aisle as long as they paid for it.
So that is a way maybe of generating business.
It's a business method. But you couldn't get a patent for that.
You can't get a patent for a mathematical method. And some years ago, a gentleman devised a very, very good technique for calculating square roots.
Of figures. It was clever. Very clever.
But basically the court said, of course, he complained the patent office wouldn't give him a patent.
The court said, no, this is really a mathematical method.
It's a way of carrying out a calculation. And you can't have a patent for that.
I think it's a bit harsh. Of course it was useful, but not allowed.
You can't have patents for presentations, information and literary and or artistic works, etc.
That's perhaps rather obvious about this one. Now, most of you have seen this stuff.
We have used it. See Amazon one click process at the end of their website if you've decided you want to buy something.
This has been very successful. A lot of people I'm sure use Amazon because how they registered with Amazon put their credit card details in.
They know they could buy something in a matter of minutes rather than plotting
their way through endless pages requiring requesting them to put in data.
This stops people having to do that. Very clever. Is it patentable?
No, it's not. Because although it was very clever.
They said it was argued that it wasn't the only novelty of this was that there was some step in the background to this technique,
which was different from that used in previous types of process.
So it was new and may have been clever, but it was said that the.
What they had done. Was actually.
Improved a business method. There was no and you were not allowed to rely upon improvements of business methods in order to get a patent.
So this is a very practical example, very useful, which is basically not being entitled to have patent protection in Europe at least.
Still arguments going on in America, etc., where the law is different.
But success doesn't necessarily mean patentability.
I'm. Another thing to bear in mind is that you may think once you've got your patents through the patent office, that's the end of it.
You one. You can stop everybody. It's not as simple as that.
And in fact, being granted a patent by the patent office is really a provisional step.
It doesn't mean you have a valid patent. It means the patent office has had a good look at it, done its best,
and attempted to decide whether it's novel, whether it's inventive and had a look.
It's carried out to search for prior publications.
It's looked at them, it says, on the basis of what it's seen.
You're entitled to a patent. Now. This decision is based upon what they know.
I'll show you a little tale. This is a very successful patent related product, I should say, related to windsurfers.
And obviously you couldn't get a patent for a sale on a whole lot of extra boats or whatever.
But this this this particular invention has some specific, particular features.
It was obviously windsurf, which allowed you to have a universal joint here, which allowed the sale to be moved around,
and they could swivel the whole thing around when they wanted to change direction.
It also had these booms, these these rods down the side which hold the sale out, which were in the shape of an arc.
They're called ARC. That's what they call them in the patent.
And that's allowed the sale to bend outwards.
Now if you're windsurfing, I suppose a lot of you have done it, you would stand on the on the board here,
on your hands, would draw on the boom, and you'd lean out here.
So this is a very clever idea, but there's a bit of history.
Back in the 1950s, late 1950s,
a chap called Newman Derby used to go on on his holidays to a lake and the United States and used to take his surfboard with him.
A lot of people would paddle around on surfboards. He started paddling around with a paddle,
and then he found that if he stood up on the surfboard and he held the paddle out and as we can see, it's quite a broad paddle.
And he has the wind behind him. He moved along.
And then he could change direction, no doubt, by moving around and putting the puzzle in a different place.
So I thought, this is very clever. I thought, well, I could make this even better.
So what you did was some you had to steal the surfboard as before you had the universal joint, it had a sail.
And what you see at the end, the winds behind here, just as it was as it paddle.
Remember the winds here? So the wind's coming up from behind as a square sail here.
And you stand in front of it and you rotate. It's not a rather cumbersome way you steer it.
Now, these square sails very similar to very old sailing boats.
Now, the problem was that Mr. Darby didn't have much money and they didn't have much time.
So although he started a business and selling these surfboards, he didn't actually make a tremendous amount of money out of it.
Now, there was another story, parallel story. And the pictures aren't very good.
But this was about a boy, about 12 years old, 1958.
He built what appeared to be a windsurfer, I'm not sure which is contemporaneous.
And he made it from curtain rods, the rods that you hang curtains on.
That was the boom. Remember that? And he in a triangular sail.
And he sailed across bits of the south coast of England.
It wasn't commercial. He was just playing around. He just built it himself.
Uh. He didn't publish anything. Nothing written about it. Now when these people, Schweitzer and Drake, who were the people who invented this?
The windsurfer we started off with. And they didn't know anything about Mr. Chilvers.
And they didn't know much about Mr. Darby. They knew nothing about it all.
Unfortunately, Mr. Chilvers.
That had what his saying was very similar to this.
And the important thing was that Chilvers had done what he'd done.
Done. Excuse me. In 1958, whoever.
A long time before the patents filed. The priority date is the date upon which the earliest patent for this was filed anywhere.
So that's the date when you decide whether this is inventive.
Well. Mr. Schweitzer from Drake didn't like competition very much.
They sued a company called Tab Marine who was making wind surfers.
Type of Marine. Said your patents invalid.
And they said and the reasons are that Mr. Chilvers was using something identical before you filed your patent application.
Schweitzer. Drake said, no, it wasn't the same because the boom, the spitter you hang off with straight.
It's just bits of straight wood here. And the patent requires it to be all cut to be in the shape of an arc.
The Court said. No.
When you use Mr. Chilvers sail board windsurfer and you lean on it, the booms, these bits here will become all quite lean out and they'll bend.
So when it is actually being used, it is identical to that.
So you can't have a patent. They also said in any event, it would be invalid because the use of okay, the sale is different from that sale.
The square sale. And it's, you know, pushing from behind.
But they say it would be obvious to change one type of cell for another.
So this is an unfortunate case in many ways because you have people who quite innocently filed a patent.
They made a good invention, but it wasn't enough value, but it wasn't valid.
They didn't know that. Hardly anybody knew about Mr. Chilvers.
A 12 year, 13 year old boy. He didn't publish anything.
Somebody just knew about it. And then he explained what had happened.
So when we're deciding whether patents new and inventive, we don't just look at what is published in scientific documents.
You can also look at what people have done, what they've used.
And in this case, it was absolutely fatal. But sad.
Well, they have to be more careful about how you draft your patent specification.
And in the case of Schweitzer and the Windsurfer, they tried to limited by particular technical features like the oil boom,
etc., etc., to distinguish it from things that have gone before.
Well. What we have here is anyone who.
Dyson. Dyson hand dryer.
I'm sure many of you use this now if you you're going to get a patent for your Mr. Dyson and you want to get a sorry backbone.
You want to get a patent for this hand dryer. You can't just have a patent which says, I claim a handrail or I claim a device which produces hot,
hot air which which people can blow their hands and dry them.
There's been known for years. They're not new. You couldn't pattern them.
So what is it? What sort of pattern could Mr. Dyson get?
Well. Why is this hand dryer, in Mr. Dyson's words, anyway, better than what had gone before?
Well, basically the promotion first hand dryer says you can dry your hands in 15 seconds on both sides.
And, you know, with conventional hand drives, you go to Oxford Station.
There'll be a nozzle and you put your hands under like this, and then you have to do the back.
And it takes a long time. Think about Dyson's hand dryers.
You just put your hands and up and down, up, down like this.
50 seconds later, they're dry. And what he basically had done is say, well, we're going to shape this so that it's like somebody's hand.
So the back of the hand is facing this side, the front there.
So the distance between the machine and the hand is the same.
All the way up here is going to follow the shape of the hand and it's going to blow air from both sides.
Very strong air jets, move them up and down very quick.
So basically it was this idea of having being able to dry both hands, sorry, both sides of the hand.
At the same time, he obviously couldn't get a patent for just a hairdryer.
Sorry, a hand dryer. So you have to look at what the the new features are.
What is it do? What's made it different? What's made an invention?
Patents. Not everybody gets a patent.
Not everybody wants a patent and some things you just can't patent at all.
If you have an industrial process which is very efficient, it may be successful because it has its use.
They've just optimised the temperature, the pressure that that the speed at which the machine goes.
A lot of manufacturing data, it may be in volumes, but there's nothing patentable.
You can't point to an invention. You can still protect that, but you have to be protected as no how.
And the law will protect know how it varies across Europe has to have that protection operates but this is a UK position.
If you can show it's confidential, information is confidential.
And if you tell somebody else about it, like your employees or your researchers, you tell them.
And confidential circumstances, I mean, obvious ways to do it, to say this is confidential.
Then you can protect it as long as it doesn't enter the public domain.
As long as it doesn't become public. Now. This doesn't have to be complicated.
As I say, it could be masses of masses of technical data for a manufacturing process, but it can be simple.
And this is not just technical information. It's also commercial information.
I give you one example. A pop group called the Rock Bottom Girls, and they thought they had a great idea for a television series.
Which would describe the adventures of this pop group as a tour around the country.
So they approached Thames Television as they then were ITV, whatever, and their manager, Mr. Fraser said, told ITV.
He said, Well, would you be interested in this idea we've got?
And they said, Yeah, sounds interesting.
He said, Well, if you want to do a series like this, a condition is that you put the girls in it as part of the cast.
You give them jobs. So they went away and they did produce the series, but they didn't put the girls in the cast.
They ignored it. And Mr. Fraser and the girls sued Thames Television.
And they said you're in breach of confidence.
There was a lot of argument actually in the case about copyright and the idea, well, we know you can't have copyright in an idea.
But eventually they got to this point saying, well, it may not be any copyright the idea, but the idea is confidential.
And Thames Television had no right to use it except on the conditions that had been proposed to them.
So it can be very simple. That was up was that was all the confidential information.
But it's protected. So it can be very, very effective as a means of protecting information.
And it's cheap. It cost you anything. I'll give you one important example.
The hair we say can last forever. The recipe for Coca-Cola.
That. Has been kept confidential since 1886.
And that's much longer than any patterns. And they lock it away in a safe in a vault somewhere.
And apparently very few people know what it is except those that are using it to make product.
But it's almost perpetual. So if you look after your secret information, you'll know how your confidential information.
You can have protection forever. One of the problems with it is that it's easily sorry.
It's easily lost. So if it leaks out and there's no breach of confidence or you publicised it in some way,
it wouldn't be very good for protecting Mr. Dyson's hand dryer.
Because as soon as Mr. Dyson had installed that hand dryer in a washroom somewhere, everybody would know or be able to find out how it was made.
They take it to bits. So that was in the public domain. So protection for that as a patent.
No use for that. But information processes things that are secret, you know, that you can get very long protection.
So not to be forgotten. People often forget about this in terms of intellectual property.
Some people say it isn't intellectual property at all, but it performs the same function.