Steve van Dulken's Patent blog

Recycling PET plastic

Each month I submit a story about inventions to the Ideas21 website, and July's is on recycling PET plastic. PET, or PETE in the USA, is the familiar flexible, thin-walled bottles used for pressurised drinks.

Ideas21 has monthly "Last Thursday" meetings (except in the summer) about innovation topics, where a talk is followed by networking. The meetings are in inner London, near the Strand. There are also monthly meetings in Manchester, with the first on the 13 September this autumn.

I find that I am frequently encouraging inventors to join local groups to pick up ideas from those more experienced in getting products to market. The British Library has a list of UK inventors' groups and other sources of Information for Inventors on their web site.

Emotiv's brain control headset

I have just read a BBC story about Emotiv, an Australian company which plans to launch a game which involves the reading of your brain patterns. The story includes a drawing of the headset that would be used.

I've had a look and the company has had six world applications published, including the Method and System for Detecting and Classifying Mental States , which was published in March 2007 and their Inertial Sensor Input Device in June 2008. That last one is key to the game itself as it involves the way the sensing of the thought waves interact with a computer. The end of the mouse, perhaps. The opening pages offer a brief but interesting survey of how at present we interact with computers.

There is even the Method and System for Detecting and Classifying Facial Muscle Movements, which suggests to me a very interesting computer game based on the player's expression. This is its main drawing.

The way the game would work would be that a headset would be linked by wifi to a USB dongle plugged into the computer, and your thoughts (and facial expressions) would influence the playing of the game. A gyroscope would control the movement of a camera checking facial expressions (such as a raised eyebrow). All this for $299.

Douglas Englebart's original patent for the mouse, incidentally, was called the X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System , and was also a revolution in its time.

I am sure that many are thinking that the ability of computers to sense what you are thinking could be used to conduct interrogations of prisoners -- or the interviewing of potential staff.

Consultation on the Patent Research Exception

The UK Intellectual Property Office has launched a consultation on the patent research exception. The "exception" is the right to build a patented invention for experimental reasons. For example, in order to consider possible modifications. This does not infringe the patent.

Section 60 (5) of the Patent Act 1977 is the relevant legislation. See pages 5 and 6 of this portion of the Act, where wording in italics is the legislation, with normal type being used for explanatory comment, in the Manual of Patent Practice.

Comments on the impact of this exception are invited by the 7 November.

The iPhone® 3G patent application

Today is launch day for Apple's iPhone® 3G.

I am always interested in tracking down published patent applications for new products, and this was no exception. The problem is that, besides Apple being so prolific, electronic inventions are often covered by a mixture of new and old patent applications and by copyright. It's usually hard/ impossible without expert knowledge to track the right ones down.

A search on Google led me to a story about the USPTO having just published the application for what the writer believed was the technology in the new iPhone®. It includes a link to the American patent application, and depicts the main illustration, also shown here.

Yes, the American application was published on the 29 May. What the writer didn't realise was that the same invention was published in the PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) system to request protection across much of the world on the 13 March, 10 weeks earlier.

The Touch Screen Device, Method, and Graphical User Interface for Determining Commands by Applying Heuristics is by numerous inventors, including Steve Jobs. It has no fewer than 501 pages, including some 300 pages of drawings. Forecasts are that it will be a huge success, as the iPhone now offers the iPod, high-speed web connections and easy-to-use GPS.

Corporate plan for intellectual property

The UK Intellectual Property Office, formerly the Patent Office, has published a 34-page Corporate Plan setting out the challenges facing intellectual property, and what they hope to do do in the future. 

There are of course other agencies involved in stimulating prosperity and creativity. The Plan refers to related documents, including Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy, published in February 2008 by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. That report points out that over the last decade the creative sector has increased at twice the rate of the rest of the economy. Its emphasis is on encouraging more young people into the sector.

New British Library online course on searching databases

For those who have completed Course 1 (on the basics of intellectual property), the British Library has launched Course 2 on searching databases in patents, designs and trade marks.

The courses are free and are described on a page which also links to registration details. Course 2 in theory takes two hours to complete. The result is someone who has a much better idea of how to use the links to databases listed at the bottom of the British Library's home page for intellectual property.

Improving the wheelchair

Traditionally wheelchairs have both looked clumsy and been inefficient for their users. Now Michael Spindle of Radlett, Hertfordshire, has done something about it.

A story in The Independent, Trekinetic: Reinventing the wheelchair gives details. Back in 2000, Spindle was at Luton airport with his family and noticed a teenager dressed in a trendy way in a very boring looking wheelchair. The contrast jarred, and he began to sketch designs on the back of his boarding pass.

The redesign consists of a moulded carbon-fibre seat to which the other components are fitted (large wheels on each side and a smaller wheel at the rear, for a start). British registered design 3025081 is shown here.

Spindle worked on the whole by himself, although the fact that he ran a small engineering company (D.T. Clayton (Toolmakers) Limited) must have helped. The article says that six different patent filings were made to cover different aspects of the invention.

I can only find one patent application that has so far been published, his Improved Wheelchairs and Wheeled Vehicles. This is its main drawing, and shows in a more conceptual way the general design.

Although the article is packed with interesting details, including the warm reception given to the invention -- apparently people come up to users and comment on it, which is not a normal reaction when someone has to use a wheelchair -- it omits to say that Trekinetic® is a registered trade mark.

Odd patents to tackle terrorism

My colleague Philip Eagle has passed me a link to the illustrated Top 10 Strangest Anti-Terrorism Patents site, which certainly has some odd material on it. 

Not listed there is one I've always found intriguing, the Airplane Hijacking Injector.  Remote control is used to inject through the cushion to either sedate or kill. Better hope it doesn't go off accidentally -- and no doubt terrorists would learn not to be sitting down when they made their demands. This is the main drawing from the patent.