Open Metal Detector Project Charter

[Davor]

Mostly because of uselessness. If you want your IP protected, you have copyright on your side. But also as you mentioned, legal status of a patent by an individual is shaky at best. Say bugwhiskers - he has a valid patent, properly examined and undisputed, loosely related to the marketing leader's solutions via a common prior art (by George Paltoglou), and yet he got funked over and stolen his property. If only he was a corporation with a strong team of lawyers, he'd funk them back. Well ... he is not.

Financial expenses are not showing the time and effort with preparing a patent application - gathering prior art etc.

So what is it good for? Precisely nothing.

There is a single use of an individual patent I can think of: it is often one of the admission criteria to be hired as a professor at some academia.

Otherwise it is a corporation toy. It is tailored for their needs.

[WM6]

... but largely pointless.

Due its real legal status or due coexisting expenses?

[Davor]

... but largely pointless.

[moodz]

..open source does not necessarily protect you from legal action .... if they are going to sue someone they have to start somewhere .. if they want to make an example of you they could start with you ... it will cost you $5000 just to get a basic legal opinion even if you are innocent.

Best plan is publish "new ideas" under bogus name and use the idea without making big deal of if on forums etc. If it is covered by a patent you dont want to be the one promoting patent infringement by publishing and using the idea. Your only other recourse is publish your own patent. ( not as hard as some make out :-) )

[scrungy_doolittle]

Thanks Q and Davor. These answers set the field for me. It seems the only way to avoid being trampled by the corporates is wield the bloody big stick of open source. As someone who has been extensively and continually targeted by government and corporates alike, I know first-hand the bas tardry of politics and legislation that protects the big boys and squashes the rest. Justice and democracy do not exist in Australia, unless you have money. We here live under the mentality of an extended Penal colony. Penal-capitalism. The elite consider us wards of the state, and will not be satisfied until our rights are fully removed to reflect this. It is all about the criminalisation of society for profit.
The litigious mentality of Penal and Seppo Capitalism has overstepped the mark. The use of litigation in such matters should either not be legal, or be freely available to all. Not reserved for the rich.
In the words of a barrister "Oh, no, the judiciary system doesn't work like that! ". Sorry.

The big bloody stick of open source has worked very well for many things, even commercial items. I love your legal eagle quote "oh no, the judiciary system doesn't work like that." Very true.
You owe your cell phone, and probably your router among other things to the open source community. Linux and Android...My router runs an embedded linux.
The thing with open source, and public domain, is that it protects you from someone squashing you. Sure, you will have competition, but you can still continue to make and produce the item
without violating IP. Even of you have an idea you keep secret, sooner or later, if it is worth anything, someone *will* reverse engineer it. I've done my share of reverse engineering products, and
creating better products based on what I've learned. And more importantly, prior art will forestall patents.

[Tim]

Thanks Q and Davor. These answers set the field for me. It seems the only way to avoid being trampled by the corporates is wield the bloody big stick of open source. As someone who has been extensively and continually targeted by government and corporates alike, I know first-hand the bas tardry of politics and legislation that protects the big boys and squashes the rest. Justice and democracy do not exist in Australia, unless you have money. We here live under the mentality of an extended Penal colony. Penal-capitalism. The elite consider us wards of the state, and will not be satisfied until our rights are fully removed to reflect this. It is all about the criminalisation of society for profit.
The litigious mentality of Penal and Seppo Capitalism has overstepped the mark. The use of litigation in such matters should either not be legal, or be freely available to all. Not reserved for the rich.
In the words of a barrister "Oh, no, the judiciary system doesn't work like that! ". Sorry.

[Qiaozhi]

Getting around the "not invented here" syndrome is very very very difficult.

I think we all agree that the lone inventor is caught between a rock and a hard place. Let's assume you've just had a [brilliant] idea, but have no way to commercialise it ... the "not invented here" brigade will ignore it (although sometimes inventors can be blinded to commercial reality, and the disinterested company may have some good reasons for being disinterested), and a patent is next to useless. So, what can you do?

It's probably best not to have any brilliant ideas.

[scrungy_doolittle]

A whole difference is - are you going to production or not? Turkish and Bulgarian small scale manufacturers do it. They start with a design, make a detector, and then make some more. If you are not up to making a line of detectors yourself, safest way of ensuring you'll be able to do so when you change your mind is to put it all to public domain, or alternatively keep it entirely to yourself.
Public domain is a place everyone may grab what is needed, but it will not work for you if you are not in a sharing mood.

Keeping it to yourself makes sense if you have in mind some solution that is entirely different from the current state of art. There is no patent in the world that will prevent such an idea to mysteriously pop here and there in forms that are not violating your precious patent. If you are serious about it - start your own production before others. Idea that is already in production is as good as patented - it is not patentable by others.

All technology at the market right now is more or less known among the members of this forum. There are no surprises, only incremental improvements. There is no significant improvement in neither depth nor discrimination, but patents flow of big manufacturers seem uninterrupted. One person alone can't match that pace.

The only way to win a rigged game... is to not play it.

Eric Foster until only recently did not have any patents. Instead he was first to market, and he was good at it. As an individual inventor that's about maximum one may hope for.

Davor, once again you nailed it on the head!

Back in 1976 I had two ideas for metal detectors. I called Whites up and spoke to them about the possibility of them using the ideas.
They made the best detectors, and I had an idea. I still believe that they would not have stolen the ideas, but I wound up only discussing one with them
They sent me an NDA. in that NDA it essentially said, we can't tell
you what we are doing, but if it is the same as what you are revealing, then we can go ahead and do it without compensation.

A rough paraphrase.
Translated, we don't know what you have in mind, but if we are doing it already, we can continue to do it. But we won't tell you what we are doing. (leaving the door open for them to simply say
oh yes, we are already working on that idea, when they were not), and taking it and using it.


One idea was to use a micro processor to set discrimination parameters, and a digital meter to show responses. I had that mapped out and designed pretty carefully.
I never shared that idea.

The one I did, and I still think is a valid way of ground balance, was to provide a 3rd very small receiving coil, null balanced along with the main receiving coil, and using the signal from that
as a real time ground signal to remove the ground matrix from the main signal. That is, the theory being that the very small sample area (about an inch across) would almost all of the time, NOT have a target in it, and if it ever did, it would be very fleeting. BUT it would always be affected by the ground, this reading the ground and providing a signal that could be used to remove the ground effect.

I did discuss this with Whites.
I have long forgotten who I talked to, but not his words: "gaussian noise minus gaussian noise is gaussian noise".

Getting around the "not invented here" syndrome is very very very difficult.

[scrungy_doolittle]

There are other things to consider, such as relief on corporation tax if your product is patented -> https://www.gov.uk/guidance/corporat...the-patent-box
Although this will be going away sometime next year in its present form, and the new model will link tax breaks to the location where the R&D is carried out. This is to stop 'creative accounting' by some large companies.

Patents can also increase the value of your company, especially if another company wants to buy you.

It depends what you need the patent for. If you just want it as protection for your IP, then you probably need to think hard before spending the money.

In the US there are no tax breaks. Perhaps one can depreciate the patent over it's 17 year lifetime. My boss, who is an older ex Texas Instrument VP, says that they are more a marketing gimmick than anything. Once you have successfully gotten one here in the US, then you have "maintainance" fees. I think there are 3 or 4 spaced across the life of the patent. Fail to make those payments, and you
lose the patent. For a large company with deep pockets, patents can be useful. But for a small guy... Let me share a real true to life experience.
My first job out of college was working for a man named Stephen Toussaint in Mishawaka Indianna. He had managed to patent what amounted to the binary search. His patent was for a system that
identified a location based on a unique signature. His laymans description: Assume that you have 10 friends with flashlights in a dark field at night. you holler out to them, where are you. Everyone turns on his flashlight. What do you know? Only the locations, However, if each person blinked his light according to a pattern, then you had "signature coded target recognition". The application was to video. Back in 1980, graphics was fairly primitive on home computers. My job was to implement this on a TRS-80. What I did was use the push and pop instructions (the fastest load and store into memory). I made a copy of the entire screen (1024 locations), then painted the upper half of the screen with * astericks, and the lower half black. A light sensitive diode which was embedded in a pen and connected to the processor, was then read. The status of the wire depended on whether or not the led was sitting on light. So I would determine if there was light or not. Then I would restore the half of the screen that was opposite to that. so If I saw light, I would restore the black half back to what it was. Then I repeated the process with the half where the pen was pointing. Again painted it half black and half white. Each time I read the scan, a bit was set or cleared in a register. This proceeded until there was no more to do. At this point, the register contained the BINARY NUMBER of the particular character spot in the display that the pen was pointing to. It took 7 frame refreshes, so I could get about 8 locations a second.
What does this have to do with anything?
Well Mattel came out with what they called VEIL (which allowed a game to interact with a TV. Essentially they would paint targets on the tv screen and then change the color or erase them on various frames. The result is that the target would emit a signature in the form of flashes that the photocell gun could pick up. An absolute and direct violation of this patent. They totally ignored Steves letters to cease and desist, his attorneys letters etc. They knew 1. They had DEEP pockets. 2. This was a single individual and that he had no deep pockets.
so they were free to violate the patent, because they knew he could NOT enforce it.
This patent was worthless, did not add any value to his company. He had another patent that saw limited commercial production, but was quickly outdated.

So patents are an individual inventor's losing game. A large company sledge hammer. So if you have an original Idea, getting some company to accept it and pay you for it is rare. The safest thing to do is to place it into the public domain (yes give it away) . Why? Because you can then use it, and no one can take it away.

The open source and copyleft have proven this to be a highly sucessful strategy.

[Davor]

A whole difference is - are you going to production or not? Turkish and Bulgarian small scale manufacturers do it. They start with a design, make a detector, and then make some more. If you are not up to making a line of detectors yourself, safest way of ensuring you'll be able to do so when you change your mind is to put it all to public domain, or alternatively keep it entirely to yourself.
Public domain is a place everyone may grab what is needed, but it will not work for you if you are not in a sharing mood.

Keeping it to yourself makes sense if you have in mind some solution that is entirely different from the current state of art. There is no patent in the world that will prevent such an idea to mysteriously pop here and there in forms that are not violating your precious patent. If you are serious about it - start your own production before others. Idea that is already in production is as good as patented - it is not patentable by others.

All technology at the market right now is more or less known among the members of this forum. There are no surprises, only incremental improvements. There is no significant improvement in neither depth nor discrimination, but patents flow of big manufacturers seem uninterrupted. One person alone can't match that pace.

The only way to win a rigged game... is to not play it.

Eric Foster until only recently did not have any patents. Instead he was first to market, and he was good at it. As an individual inventor that's about maximum one may hope for.

[greylourie]

So how do we protect hobbyists from legal threat ?

The concept is to encourage learning and offer hobbyists an umbrella. Can't this be a two way street, with benefit to all ? The majority of examples/projects on this forum derive from old but none the less commercial designs that in their time were cutting edge.

If hobbyists embellish or improve on a technology in some way, shouldn't it be allowed ? After all, manufacturers do that all the time.

[detectormods]

Depends on what hat you are wearing, i have seen many designs taken, changed slightly and then become a commercial product. The Chinese are experts at it. Either its a good thing or a bad thing depending on your own objectives.

[Tim]

Sorry mate, I can't tell if you're opinion is positive or facetious, for, or against sharing. Did the $200,000 a year man glean ideas from here, or steal some battlers invention?

[detectormods]

A good design could make you a small fortune, it could be the start of becoming the next White, Garratt or Minelab. Just give away your I.P, i am sure most people would rather have an average job with average salary. Go on, give it all away for free. I know one person who found Gold in the form of information on Geotech and uses this as the basis of a product they sell to detector market. I think they net $200,000 a year from it. So yes give it all away.

[Tim]

This all sounds like corporate spiel to me. Not an open metal detector project. 14 pages and not one idea presented. Only the fear and paranoia of a Cold War, big brother retribution. 14 pages of corporate propaganda to scare the bejeesus out of anyone who dares to try. The fear of litigation should not exist. It is a machination of capitalist dictatorship. Many here seem to defend the stance of the big boys whilst, and by, discouraging the individuals from disclosure of original and copied circuits.
My IB project is up and running, but the board need mods to neaten it up. I am still considering whether I will post it for 2 reasons. Firstly, if it's as good as I think it is, it will be one of the above nay-sayers who will pick it up for their company, and secondly, despite scouring this site there is very little mention or interest in anything but PI.
I am sure the moderators are repeatedly asked to compile a list of the circuits here, but for their vested reasons, don't.