NEVADA INVENTORS ASSOCIATION

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Study the past"

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Survival of the Species -- Us

Opinion by Don Costar There is an organization in Washington D.C. called Intellectual Property Owners, or by an acronym simply as IPO. This outfit, with an innocent sounding name, is known to us independent inventors as "THE ENEMY." Intellectual property pretty much means inventions. So why would I call a group of inventors the enemy? Well, mostly because they and their associates are the ones who declared war on US!

IPO is made up of the Fortune 500 types of domestic and foreign corporate giants and industrial heavyweights. Not totally, only 99%, and they do proudly state that there are independent inventor members.

They have a suite of offices in downtown Washington, staffed by very competent employees including a very competant executive director who has connections to very competent lobbying law firms. IPO furnishes its members with frequent newsletters, political briefs, legal news etc. both for foreign and domestic consumption. All very professional and as you might guess, very powerful in and around Capitol Hill, including agencies such as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Why am I telling you all this boring stuff? To give you an idea what the whole fight against "first-to-file" and the "Steal America's Patents" Act is all about.

IPO is the ideal lobbying setup for a special interest group that needs bigger and more profits to stay alive and competitive in the global business community. (Plus satisfy its stockholders) Is this bad? Of course not! It's the American way -- start a business and grow the business until it is an economic force large enough to affect the economy. This has all the positive benefits of jobs, investments, taxes and expanding technology.

But when some laws are in the way of big business' activities, and they become an obstacle instead of protection, then big business does what it has learned to do: Change the Laws!

Ordinarily this is not a problem. If it is a Federal law or regulation that needs changing, go to the people who can change it; namely the U.S. Legislators in Congress. Find out what the particular Congressmen want and furnish it in exchange for their cooperation. Some Congressmen need jobs or some sort of security when they retire, or maybe some pledges of campaign contributions, maybe a nice luxury vacation somewhere... whatever. If some little guys get squashed in the move, tough toenails! Life was never sold as fair. (That's the lobbyists attitude, not ours).

Now if individual corporations, especially foreign ones, try to do this on their own they have to find a lobbyist, negotiate fees, compare their abilities with others, hope they picked the most effective, etc., etc. All not very efficient, and could lead to stepping on each others wallets. The ideal setup is to form their own association, which would actually cost less if their dues were funneled into a common pot, and hire the best for the particular job. This is how IPO came to be formed, and since this is the age of intellectual property, it was natural that most of their problems stemmed from intellectual property conflicts.

Nearly all members of IPO are multinational in scope, so when the intellectual property laws of the U.S. and foreign governments were not synchronized a staff of legal eagles attempt to cope with the legal problems caused by doing business overseas. The solution? Change the laws!

Not the foreign laws, mind you. The foreign governments were in a position to tax or regulate American businesses out of competition at the snap of a finger. The best solution was to lobby U.S. Congress to change American laws! They called it "Harmonization." That has a nice ring to it, and Congressmen can look good voting for "harmony" with our foreign friends, like Japan and China.

It all went smoothly until someone noticed that the U.S. patent laws were about to be savaged to harmonize down to foreign law standards that do not support the creativity of inventors, (like ours) only the marketing strategies of big business. Whoa!! America's inventors got the word in a hurry and started screaming their heads off. They knew that foreign governments and multinational corporations didn't make America what it is today... Yankee ingenuity did! With American inventions!

This all took place about a decade ago. Only a few of us learned what was about to happen back in Washington so we busted our tails sending letters, faxes, phone calls, articles, letters to the editors or any thing we could think of to get the attention of Congressmen. It turned out to be a good old fashioned "ground swell" of public opinion that politicians can't ignore.

The result -- we got hearings, we got bills stopped dead in their tracks, in committee, and the big multinationals (the IPO guys) were astounded at the tenacity and burning patriotism of our little gang of "Patent Warriors," as John Trudel calls us. Since about 1988 the disorganized, underfunded, politically ignorant and frightfully out numbered independent inventor community has held the well organized, financial and political might of the IPO bunch at bay.

I use the term "at bay" because when the IPO bunch realized our little ragged group might actually influence a few conscientious Congressmen, they declared war on us, brought in the big guns and started the tactics of clever warfare: influencing (I call it corrupting) individual Congressmen to sponsor piecemeal legislation, sneaky legislative maneuvers and stacked deck hearings.

If it sounds like I'm contemptuous of the people involved who are working for a living as lawyers or executives of the big business corporations, that is not true. They were only doing their job. We understand that. My contempt is focused on people like Bruce Lehman, patent office Commissioner who groveled before the Japanese bureaucrats to sell us out. There is a hell of a difference between a patriotic American man and the political bureaucrat who would sell his soul for whatever his personal desires are. I suspect the motives, and have contempt for, members of Congress who take up the cause of an influencial self-serving private industry, or corporation, when that Congressman has no knowledge or experience in the field of their special interest .

"We can't blame those who advocate the positions of the huge corporations. They have taken up their mantle, and thus it is not up to them to look out for the independents and small companies that take the risks and create the innovations that we all eventually benefit from. That is what our elected representatives are for." (Anonymous quote off an internet forum.)

So that brings us to the present... Last September 10th, the IPO bunch held a "Lobby Day." It was a damn well financed and well organized move on Congress (the Senate in particular) where constituents and businesses from each Senator's state made appointments to lobby the virtues of Senate bill S.507. Whatever lies, promises of financial help, or just eloquent rhetoric, blanketed the U.S. Senate that day we can only guess. But what is certain is that it was a desperate attempt to save a bill that is liable to destroy inventors' patent protection forever, but greatly help the bottom line of a lot of Japanese and American corporations

Can we independent inventors match that onslaught of money and legal talent? Of course not! But we did what we do best. We called and faxed messages of S.507 opposition to our Senators. It's the only weapons we have. We've been called ignorant, strident, fanatics, fringe lunatics, Timothy McVeigh types and uneducated rabble. Perhaps to the Bruce Lehman cocktail circuit we are perceived as less than the wealthy, perfumed dandies of whom they are accustomed, but we are the ones who built this country -- not the hired guns of politics and business.

Now you have a picture of what this fight is all about. It's not sexy nor shocking enough to attract the attention of the media. Most Americans don't even know of the insidious danger to our national economy. But you can bet there will be some wailing and shouting if S.507 is passed in our Senate. I expect we'll hear from people saying, "Why didn't you warn us?" "Why didn't somebody say something?"

So to those who have stood by our side and sent messages to your Congressmen, thank you for helping America. To those of you who sat on your hands and did nothing, shame on you! We have fought a good fight... For survival. Survival of the Species -- Us!

Money for Start-ups and Expansion

That headline caught your eye didn't it? Well, the seminar next Wednesday, October 1st, should catch your butt plopping into a seat around 4:00PM at Harrah's Reno.

This is your friendly SBDC at work, and some of the programs they put on are tailor made for us inventor types. This opportunity to learn something is a prime example of the knowledge available to us if we grasp it.

The program is sponsored by the Nevada Small Business Development Center (SBDC), the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) and the College of Business Administration, University of Nevada. It is co-sponsored by eight local banks, Nevada State Development Corporation, Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE) and the Nevada Self-Employment Trust. That means they're picking up the tab.

It will be from 4:00PM to 7:00PM in the Douglas Room of Harrah's Reno, October 1, 1997. The title of the program is "A Lenders' Open House -- SBA Financing"

You will meet the local SBA lenders and learn about the SBA financing programs they package, their requirements, and what you will need to apply for an SBA loan.

The SBA in Nevada guarantees over $60 million annually for start-ups and business expansions. There are new programs designed for small businesses to obtain smaller loans. Women, minority and veteran-owned businesses are finding it easier to apply for and obtain loans through the SBA program.

Is it for everyone? No, I don't think so. For one thing, these are not grants of free money just for applying. They are loans that have stringent regulations, but may be the one area where an inventor can tip the scales in his favor when trying to market a product.

Pre-registration is mandatory, so if you plan to attend call the SBDC at 784-1717 and get on the attendee list.

A 14-year-old boy claims he has designed a program to topple the world's biggest computer glitch.

The so-called millennium bug could trigger worldwide computer chaos at the start of the year 2000, foiling stock markets, government payrolls and telephone bills -- and just about everything else involving computers.

Computer analysts estimate that fixing the bug will cost between $300 billion and $600 billion. As many as 80 percent of all computers could be affected.

But young Nicholas, a conundrum-solving kid who has tinkered with puzzles since he was a toddler, says he has the answer. Nicholas, however, is keeping his information under tight wraps and will not divulge how the program works, pending a patent.

"It is just great knowing that my program does exactly what I hoped it to do. And yeah, it's fantastic," he said.

A computer analyst, has studied Nicholas' solution and considers it a remarkable breakthrough.

"Nick has come up with something very clever. I've not seen anything like this yet," he said. "There's a couple of attempts I've seen on the Internet so far, but none of them solve the problem like Nick does."

The problem dates back to the 1960s when computer memory was limited and expensive. Many software programs only used the last two numbers in the year, such as 97 instead of 1997.

Many of those programs are still being used in some older PC software and large mainframe computers -- used by government agencies, universities, Wall Street and businesses worldwide.

All such computers are vulnerable to this cyber-disaster -- but not if NIcholas can help it. Meanwhile, the clock ticks on ...

As an inventor, you realize that if we all made the perfect prototype, or developed a product that was 100% perfect, there would be no room for improvement, right? Then it follows that with no room for improvement, and nearly all inventions are improvements over existing technology, we'd be in a hell of a fix.

OK, this is a little facetious, but the point is, maybe there are areas where only 99.9% is going to affect somebody. Taking into account the enormous size of our world, consider this:

* 114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes will be shipped/year

* 18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled/hour

* 2,000,000 documents will be lost by the IRS this year

* 2.5 million books will be shipped with the wrong covers

* Two planes landed at Chicago's O'Hare airport will be unsafe every day

* 315 entries in Webster's Dictionary will be misspelled

* 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will be written this year

* 880,000 credit cards in circulation will turn out to have incorrect cardholder information on their magnetic strips

* 103,260 income tax returns will be processed incorrectly during the year

* 5.5 million cases of soft drinks produced will be flat

* 291 pacemaker operations will be performed incorrectly

* 3056 copies of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal will be missing one of the three sections

Skepticisms is the longest word that alternates hands.

A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.

In the 1940s, the FCC assigned television's Channel 1 to mobile services (two-way radios in taxicabs, for instance) but did not re-number the other channel assignments. That is why your TV set has channels 2 and up, but no channel 1.

The "save" icon on Microsoft Word shows a floppy disk, with the shutter on backwards. [probably not the ONLY thing they do backwards]

The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning "containing arsenic."

Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian coat of arms for that reason.

Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.

POLITICS - From the greek POLY meaning many and TICKS meaning little blood sucking creatures

When Don used to do the newsletter, he would smear the renewal date on the mailing label with a red felt tip marker, thinking that anyone seeing the dreaded red smear would immediately hop to their checkbook and respond to the cryptic message. That was Don's folly. The only one who mentioned it when sending in a renewal check was Jim Newell, last year.

So the only reasonable thing to do is what Bryan suggested -- put the name of the person who's dues are expiring in a special column for that purpose.

Will it work? Will the prospect of the horror of seeing one's name in the "pooped out" column galvanize all members to renew one month early? Will someone shoot the editor? Who knows.

Yep, the world famous Levi's were invented right here in Reno. By whom? Levi Strauss, you say? Wrong. Where were they first sold? San Francisco? Wrong again. Next month some fascinating facts about those hip-huggers.
San Francisco Trivia: Did you know that before the California gold rush in '49 the city was called "Yerba Buena?" Also, all the land in San Francisco east of Montgomery Street (the financial district) is built on land fill? No fooling! I'm sure everyone knows that San Francisco is west of Los Angeles. But did you know that Reno is too? Check your map. It's true!

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"The past is prologue, Study the past"

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