Trevor Baylis is ‘farking’ nuts

For those of you who don’t know who Trevor Baylis is, which I didn’t until this stupidity got some notice, he is the man who invented the wind-up radio.

But that isn’t what is getting him all the attention that has occurred over the last couple of days. The attention comes from his suggestion that anyone caught ‘stealing’ intellectual property should be charged as a criminal. It’s his opinion as told to Register writer Kelly Fiveash that inventors need more protection from people who attempt to copy or steal their ideas. At this point in time those kind of cases end up as civil lawsuits where the rights-holder has to prove that their ‘idea’ was stolen or copied and then try to be compensated.

"If I was to nick your car, which is worth £10,000, say, I could go to jail," Baylis told the BBC.

"But if I were to nick your patent, which is worth a million pounds, you’d have to sue me.

"And if I was a colossal company, or indeed another country, that had stolen your invention, how could you find a million pounds a day to take me to court?"

Source: The Register – Brit inventor wants prison for patent crims

Well, given the current environment where even a home page can be trademarked the idea that copying that could land some-one in jail is the very height of stupidity. The only thing that doing something like this would do is cause an instant freeze on any kind of innovation.

One member of the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys described Baylis’s comments about criminalising patent violations as “barking mad”, while another said the parallel with copyright protection was a misleading one.

"Patent infringement is not remotely like flogging knock-off CDs.

"Honest, decent people running reputable businesses infringe patents. They might not know the patent exists, or their patent attorney might have told them it was valid or infringed."

Given the number of times that large corporations like Microsoft and Apple find themselves dragged into court over stupid things that shouldn’t have been patentable in the first place would now find themselves having to hire defense attorneys instead of patent lawyers. The fear that would permeate through out the whole technology world alone would bring new products and R&D to a grinding halt.

Dumb idea Mr. Baylis – very dumb.

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