Yes, I understand that having written it into a public forum, and not patenting
it, I did indeed give it away for anyone else to use. What probably happened
was that someone was suing someone else for stealing that idea, and one of
those somebodies did a REALLY extensive search and found my invention.
Presumably it would have benefited the somebody who did the search to be able
to say something like, "We didn't steal the idea from you, Jim Bell thought of
it first..." Yes, in hindsight I should have taken the $5000 and run.
Jim Bell
On Friday, March 13, 2015 1:04 PM, Stephen D. Williams <[email protected]>
wrote:
If you didn't patent it and you published it publicly, you effectively gave
it away for anyone to use. It is also now prior art, so finding a link that
proves it was published would be useful. And you have bragging rights to
inventing it if you were first.
So, the $5000 would have been a good deal since you didn't have any value to
sell, since everyone already "owns" a license to use it.
sdw
On 3/13/15 11:21 AM, jim bell wrote:
Approximately December 24, perhaps it was 1996, I published an idea on a
USENET area (maybe it was SCI.CRYPT) that proposed an idea that clock
oscillators used in computers could be frequency-modulated with a long-period
pseudo-random (linear feedback shift register) value to smear the output of the
signal (and everything that depends on it) over a range of frequencies.
Curiously, in early 2007 (When I was at United States Penitentiary, Florence
Colorado) I received a letter from a law firm offering me $5,000 for ownership
of this idea. (They had apparently figured out who I was, and had traced me
down at my then-current address.) I presumed that around that time, there was
probably a lawsuit challenging a patent on this matter, and the law firm was
doing 'due diligence' looking for ammunition. I counter-offered that if they
pay me 1/3 of the value of this idea, I would settle for that. Never heard
back from them. Jim Bell
