Robert Leguillon <robert.leguil...@hotmail.com> wrote: Due to the international nature of these patents, what do you predict today? >
I know little about patents. My only prediction is that the people who deserve a patent for the basic invention of cold fusion will not get one. Cold fusion is essentially in the public domain. That is what intellectual property experts have told me. > Would LENR be coopted by the IAEA or UN? Would there be a declaration of > energy as a "human right", and thus richer countries subsidizing the energy > needs of poorer nations? I do not think that will be necessary. Cold fusion devices will be so cheap that even people in the Third World will be able to purchase them, just as they purchase automobiles and bicycles today. They also purchase large amounts of kerosene for illumination. If they stop spending money on kerosene and gasoline for automobiles and motorcycles, there will be plenty of money left over for them to buy cold fusion devices instead. They pay much more for kerosene per liter than we do. They pay thousands of times more per lumen for lighting than we do. I predict this problem will solve itself. However, the tangle of intellectual property and the injustice against people such as Fleischmann will not be solved except with deliberate government action. Governments and big industry caused this problem in the first place by ignoring cold fusion for 22 years despite conclusive evidence that it exists and it is a potential source of energy. They caused the problem; let them fix it. As for how the US citizens might pay our share of this, the amount of money we will save by abolishing the Department of Energy and bankrupting Exxon will easily pay for it. The money we will save in a single day will pay for it. The 20,000 lives we save per year by closing down the coal industry will pay for it hundreds of times over. Add in the benefits from bankrupting Iran and reducing military threats in the Middle East and the cost of compensating Fleischmann et al. becomes a rounding-off error. Bankrupting Saudi Arabia will probably not have any direct benefits for us other than schadenfreude. - Jed
