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Woo! My (Pending) Patent Is Listed!
A polynomial clothoid
In 2015, I did some research on curves (the sort of curves made if you play with a guitar string or a piece of springy wire), and my employer, Robert Bosch GmbH, decided to patent it. The patent application is now listed. Here’s a blog post describing my work.
Honestly, I don’t know if my patent will make any money for Bosch. The computer graphics industry doesn’t really buy patent licenses (a lot of companies would rather make do without), but other engineering fields sometimes will (e.g., the animation industry won’t license T-Splines, but engineering firms do). Anyway, I just thought I’d share this; I’m so excited.
Published in General
I once worked in the legal department at Sealed Air corporation (the bubble wrap people). When there was downtime, I would go “organize” the file cabinets where they kept the patents. A patent is a beautiful thing. Good luck and congratulations!
Looks like what we used to call in my drafting days a French Curve.
Yep. Computers were actually not an improvement on traditional drafting tools. It’s only in the past decade or so that they’ve begun to catch up.
Course, in my drafting days, you had a little screw on the side of the pen you used to set the line width before you stuck it in the ink bottle.
Grats on the patent pending, by the way.
Congratulations! You should be excited.
Lots and lots of brilliant folk don’t have their name on a patent, and that makes you special.
(I hasten to add, Ricochet is a bit of a special place, so we have a goodly number of patent holders.)
Congratulations
I studied the automotive industry some years ago and Bosch had the most patents among auto suppliers and was second only to Toyota in total.
Congratulations!
Yay! I’m glad you’re pleased to see your idea out there.
Patents are not cheap for the company, so it is a testament to the idea that the company sees fit to pursue the patent. There are lots of reasons other than generating license revenue for large companies to try to patent an idea. And license revenue is only one of many ways to make money off of patents.
As the company’s patent lawyer probably explained to you, the company still needs to argue with the US Patent Office before a patent is granted. Your invention is in an area that is subject to a particularly large amount of argument. That means the company really believes in your idea that they are willing to pursue this patent in a currently controversial area of the patent law, since it will cost the company more than typical amounts of money to protect the idea.
[I ran the patent law function for a large corporation for a dozen years, making those decisions about where to spend on patent protection.]
From the “small world” department – I looked up the USPTO record, and see that the law firm your company is using for this application (in Indianapolis) is one of the law firms I used a lot.
Congratulations – what a cool thing to have your name on!
I know @vectorman has a few.
Congratulations! I recently described the patent system to my 5th grade students, and they were at first a little confused. Then I pointed out that wouldn’t they like to be the person who earns the money and gets the fame for something they’d invented, instead of just having everyone copy you and steal your idea? What a concept!!
Again–good for you!!
So basically, this could be used in electronic drafting?
I just started using a French curve in sewing.
Congratulations, Joseph!
Check out mine
9818383b2
havent seen a penny from it, but it’s cool to have.
congrats, Joseph!
Being a named inventor on a patent is an accomplishment. The patent is proof that you had an idea that was novel and that was not obvious to all the people of ordinary skill in the art in which you created the idea.
Only about 5% of patents can be directly tied to revenue. But, there are many other uses of patents that nonetheless provide value to the patentee (including bragging rights).
Way to go! Quite an accomplishment. Best of luck on your future pursuits.