Elad’s blog

You can’t trust anyone.

Lately I attended a nice course. It dealt with clock synchronization. Without getting too technical, the synchronization problem is that many times an (electrical) system sends a signal which is supposed to reach a few other systems at the same time. Practically, the signal reaches each destination at a slightly different time, which can cause some problems; so there are various techniques to make sure that all destinations receive the same data, and that it is correct in all of them. So after analyzing various reasons that may cause this problem (a bunch of technical terms - skew, jitter, drift, high-rate… this sort of stuff), the guy - who happens to work as a professor at the Technion - presented some possible techniques to overcome it.

At one point he told us a story about a doctorate student he once had. His student’s job was to go over many designs of synchronizers (which are special electrical circuits designated to solve this problem) and see if they’re working. As one source for these synchronizer designs he used the US Patent office, which is a good source to find such designs, he figured: when you issue a patent, you’re supposed to reveal your design, they say.

His student took such a design, and proved it not working. Very proud, he presented his work, and the satisfied profesor took it into his slides and started to present it in his lectures and teach other people with it. As it happened, after a while he presented these slides in a certain company, and the designer who issued this patent was working in that company and sat at the audience. After the lecture, he presented himself to the profesor and they had this conversation.

It turned out, that the design submitted to the patent office was not the true design they used in the company. They just thought for themselves that this neat synchronizer they’ve got is too good, and they wanted to keep it propietary, but they still wanted the patent protection (?), so they changed it a little bit, and handed to the patent office a “fixed” version. After this lecture they gave the real version to the professor, and his student proved that this one is actually working - so the student was happy (he received his Ph.D.), the professor was happy (he received this story and a few slides for his lectures), and no harm was done.

Was it so? It got me to wander - how many false patents are out there? What is the point of knowingly issuing a wrong patent? Is there no reviewer on the proposals? Is he not someone that understands what he’s doing? And why do so many companies rush to issue a patent, even on their commercial secrets?

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 8:27 and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.