Radio Broadcast (Nov 1926-Apr 1927)

Radio Broadcast Volume X NOVEMBER, 1926 Number 1 The Radio Patent Structure What It Means and Are Twenty-four Patents and What of Basic Patents Are — Radio Patents Qive Non-Technical Monopoly? — The Second of a Series of By FRENCH STROTHER UlfllCUl on the * — Does THE patent situation in radio is almost unbelievably complicated. There are twenty-four hundred American patents in force in this field, and unnumbered applications are still pending in the Patent Office. Everything that the most ingenious inventors have been able to think of to date has been covered; and every new idea, however unimportant it may seem at the moment, is at once made the basis of a new patent application, in the hope that some shift in the current of the radio art will make it more important tomorrow. Not only are basic elements in radio patented, but the various ways in which these basic elements may be combined are also patented. Physical objects, such as tubes, are patented; methods of using physical objects, such as the various "circuits," are patented; the methods of making the physical objects, such as the ways of exhausting the air in a tube, are patented. Thus, materials, methods, ideas, ■combinations of ideas, combinations of methods — all are involved in a maze of conflicting patents, owned by different (often antagonistic) inventors and their licensees or vendees or heirs. On top of this complex condition rests a mountain of patent litigation — hundreds of lawsuits, by almost everybody against almost everybody else. Nobody in the radio field today can do anything and be sure that he is not violating somebody else's legal rights. Painstaking s^lfc investigation is absolutely essential. Not even the Radio Corporation of America can be sure, though it is credited with owning anywhere from 50 per cent, to 90 per cent, of the useful radio patents. A patent does not protect against another patent, which the courts may later decide really covers a certain way of doing a certain thing. No patent is of any certain value until the courts have passed upon it. The Patent Office is a bureau of technically and legally trained men who search the records of the past and certify that, in their opinion, the new device offers either a new method or a new principle. The moment the owner of such a certificate, or patent, tries to make money by operating under it, he comes into the field of the rights of property, in other patents and no property right is finally settled, against an opposing claimant, until the courts have decided which claimant owns it. The future of radio, therefore, so far as the hands of the (.1 O ATTEMPT to untangle the complexities of the radio -patent structure is a task almost impossible of successful accomplishment. Yet, to understand the development and the present situation in radio — particularly in the manufacture of broadcast receiving apparatus — one must have a pretty clear comprehension of who owns the important patents, how they arc being used, and how that use is apt to affect the buying and selling of radio apparatus. This second article by Mr. Strother — the first appeared in Radio Broadcast for October — contains no information not available to one who makes a careful study of facts open to all; it does, however, recite those facts simply and clearly. In addition, the conclusions which the author draws show whither radio is drifting. The third and concluding article of the series will appear in the December Radio Broadcast. — The Editor. patents affect it, is courts. Now nothing that is about to be said about the courts is intended as criticism. Nobody questions for a moment the fact that the hard-working Federal judges have any thought but justice in their minds. Nevertheless, Federal judges are human beings, fallible even in their special field of law; and they are not to be blamed if they are even more likely to err in the field of complicated electrical theory that embraces radio. ' Thus it has more than once happened that these courts have finallyawarded property rights in patents beyond appeal, when the general body of technical electrical experts did not believe these rights belonged to the successful litigant. "There is, therefore, a double uncertainty in the validity of many valuable radio patents. There is first the uncertainty whether one way of doing a thing really involves a difference in electrical theory, from another way of doing the same thing. And there is the second uncertainty whether the Federal Courts will correctly measure the truth in these cases, where even the electrical experts are still in doubt. A judge, sufficiently versed in the technique of radio to make an unquestionably fair decision would have to be twenty years a radio engineer and would therefore be biased anyhow. In either event, however, it should be borne in mind that what the courts say will settle the matter practically. As ia