Part of the Innovation Cafe series by Gary Shuster, patent litigator and prolific inventor.
Transcript
Hey there I’m Gary Shuster. Welcome to Innovation Cafe. And today I want to talk with you about a Dell laptop that was stolen from my front porch in 1999 or so. Well, not so much about the laptop, but about the invention that came out of it. And the lesson. And the lesson. We’ll start at the end here. The lesson is, sometimes, if you’re too far ahead of your time, the patent system won’t help you. So what happened? Unsurprisingly, given that I already said it was stolen off the porch, I ordered a laptop from Dell. The tracking information said it had arrived, but there was no laptop and it turned out it had been stolen.
That got me thinking. There’s gotta be a way to securely deliver goods. And I came up with a system where there were shelves. There were some moving elements, but essentially what it relied on was sending a one time code to the delivery company. The delivery company would then access the locker, put the thing there, delivery in the lock or close it, and then the code is invalidated. And I’ve now seen this in use in several places. And I’m not sure if Amazon’s locker system infringes it because the patent expired before any of that happened. So there’s the lesson is I came up with something.
I was unable to find someone to build it. No one really seemed that interested in it. And more than 20 years after I invented it. So after the patent expired, people realized it was a pretty smart idea and they started to build it. So I’ll take that as a win. My technology, whether they got the idea for me or not, my technology has proven to be viable and and I love it. And you know, you win some, you lose some. But it’s an interesting argument about how long patent terms should be. Sometimes the most visionary inventors and I’m not saying I’m one of them.
I just got lucky and hit this thing early on. But really visionary inventors will come up with things decades before the supporting technology even makes them possible. And for them, should the patent system make a carve out and give them some years of protection when the supporting technology is there? I don’t know. It’s an interesting question for policy makers, but not for me. So that is the story of how I did not get rich off of an idea that is in widespread use now. Signing off from Innovation Cafe I’m Gary Schuster. Stay creative.