A Kickstarter idea could be on sale in China before fundraising has finished
qz.com
qz.com
OK, but how much real money has he lost.
I lose millions of pounds of potential money every time I play the lottery.
The 1-3% IP overhead then becomes effectively a marketing overhead.
basically it would be a private patent system for the largest world wide marketplace
It's quite likely, that there are solutions that exist that will take a large amount of investment, but yet once created will have little economic moat to protect themselves from duplication.
Not all of these solutions will be as frivolous as a retractable selfie-stick, and with a financial disincentive to investing in designing them, we create a very low likelihood that these solutions will be created.
That said, I guess unless someone can come up with a cheap system to ensure originators get paid, there's very little that we can do other than express outrage.
The article discusses other options (brand recognition, software lock-in, less common materials, etc).
If I know that my idea will get sniped, I'm not going to put the time and effort into the design and the Kickstarter.
And no, I absolutely don't agree that you should get exclusive rights to charge a 4x+ markup just because you were the "first" to claim rounded corners.
There is no point to compete with China on cheap accessories, anything that is not service based or is prohibitory expensive or complicated to make will be copied before you get even the initial samples back for evaluation.
This is actually an interesting comparison. There are plenty of open-source "clones" or (more kindly) alternatives to closed-source software, and this is seen as a good thing. What's the real difference between this and these sorts of clean-room hardware clones?
:)
Note - I'm not a subscriber to "idea === product" that many "inventors" in the US seem to espouse. I'm not suggesting that ideas are valueless, but I place a larger value on execution. If some enterprising group of people can execute on my idea and I get to own the device I was thinking about, that's still a win in my book.
Ever seen an action cam called SJ Cam? It looks like an exact copy of gopro camera. Why do you think they don't sue the manufacturer?
The answer is that they are their original OEM from whom they were buying rebranded products and sold them as hero cameras 1 and 2. They never signed any kind of agreement securing exclusive rights to the design. At the time they wanted to build their next generation cam from scratch, they were unnable to do anything with the fact that SJCam continued selling the original design.
Not only small companies buy off-the shelf designs. Not even biggest brands shy of from banal rebranding: probably more than a half of all notebook designs are off-the-shelf design house products.
Who sold Apple the reference design for the first ifone? It was Taiwanese ODM "First International Computer," and they are trying hard to conceal that fact as it will set their "designed by Apple in california" line in bad light.
If somebody had access to the repair manual for the first iphone, they could've seen many references to the ODM and individual factories making sub-assemblies.
It's no different than putting up a picture of a burger with 4 patties made of different meats, with a soft-ice on top and a waffle on the bottom. It's not a mystery how to make it, it's a mystery why anyone wants it. But if loads of people express admiration for it, why on earth should there be any protection for the guy who came up with it? He's not taking the risk on buying the meats, setting up a shop, marketing, and so forth.
In theory the person inventing it is investing time and effort into the invention itself, and the manufacturing company is risking money on a new idea.
Some protection seems reasonable. The current levels of protections - many years, is weird.
Serious food for thought.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/magazine/zpm-espresso-and-...
And years of catch-up.
Makes 100% sense, no need for innovation yet.
Just sucks if you are in a rich country.
But you might bump into the oposite problem: patent trolls taking advantage of excess of protection for ideas.
The main issue here is that the fade might be over before it would be worth to set up the heavy legal instrument for it.
I just fail to see where the news here are. It's obvious to me that not even a patent would have prevented this. So what's the news? That they copied it while it was still in the crowdfunding phase?
I think that this in fact manifest a great weakness of the western industry.
And I feel like this: I'm happy to see that a product that has no actual value (a retractile stick) is produced at a very cheap price. If only the "inventor of the retractile stick" had the rights to produce it, he'd do it at a very inflated price. Now he can't, and everybody (except him) wins.
(All of this assuming he would be granted a patent on a retractile stick, which I very much doubt)
If he had a reasonable goal like "I want a bunch of retractable selfie sticks" then he would be a winner too.
He has lost nothing and now can buy selfie sticks for $10. Why doesn't buy a bunch and put his logo on them and resell them for $30?
Definition of the inventive step in most patent systems is very weak.
I'm seeing a certain parallel between this item and the virus swiping a toxin gene from a spider story also on HN:
Unfortunately, the guy seems to have gotten busy "enforcing" the IP on copycats in China. The only people who will get any enjoyment out of that is lawyers. Sounds like he's embarking on a miserable never-ending game of wack-a-mole. And for what? A forgettable bauble-store item for impulse buyers on vacation?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_selfie-related_injurie...