Open Metal Detector Project Charter

[Carl-NC]

These assumptions can be broken and the system could work for the hobbyist ..... with the right playground setup. I believe patents could be won and defended spending very little indeed....... with low hobbyist risk.

I'd have to be convinced.

Hopefully there are enough folks with compatible motivation to form something or else we can just stay fragmented in our efforts and fearful that if a project starts to have success, then without the plan to take it forward, we have the possibility to get dragged into court and stopped when someone picks up the idea and gets too enthusiastic to take it to market.

As I've said, the downfall of the QED wasn't the QED, it was the proponents of the QED. Post #76, Item #7.

[chudster]

Possibly another option is to set up a framework where you establish an "ecosystem" that benefits the participants .... where the participants can be hobbyists or commercial enterprises. There would be some sort of point system ... similiar to ebay or frequent flyers where participants can either offer or accept "rewards" or "incentives" ... based on the generation of ideas, tasks performed ( eg testing ) or anything that assists the other members in some way.

so for instance if someone comes up with a good idea they can either put it out for the other participants to see or they can offer it privately to one or more of the participants. Then there is a voting system which allocates votes or "points" to that idea. For a public idea each member can only vote -1 ( bad or already done ) 0 ( neutral or no vote) or +1 ( good idea ).

If the idea is offered privately then the reciever can offer as many points as he/she/they want to however those points equate to redeemable benefits ..... which could be anything ...eg money, parts, test equipment, product etc.

For instance some of these fancy ADCs and take a fair bit of effort and cost to source so if there was a "group buy" or "bulk buy" then there could be considerable savings for group members.

Similiarly commercials could offer parts or test equipment or even financial assistance for "testing / experimentation " in return for ideas, investigations etc etc.

Basically some sort of barter system for things that people need or can provide. Hobbyists need parts etc ( and maybe some code written now and then ) ... commercials have market power for buying things but maybe not so many sources of fresh ideas or thinking outside the box for example.

moodz

This is getting closer to a solution. We need an ecosystem, with rules for the development and it must motivate the participants.

Chudster

[ivconic]

Minelab did that!?
No sympathies for Minelab any more!!
Minelab is history, fading to oblivion!
We enthusiasts and hobbyists can do something about that:
spread the word, do anti campaign and prevent people to waste money on their overpriced yet pretty average detectors.
War on Minelab, from now on!
...
XP rules!
XP is No1!

[Aziz]

Hi folks,

but such a complex project can't work. You need a small group and have to work in a closed and protected environment (communication via emails).
Aziz

[Mechanic]

Everyone had their pet ideas they wanted to explore and the whole thing never came together as a cohesive effort.
- Carl

Hi Guys,

This is what I would see as the biggest problem with a collaborative project, different people in different Geo-locations with different needs and different or little understanding of the "problem" due to not having experienced the "problem" . Though I do like the idea of a fully digital PI that basically has a transmitter, preamp, 24 bit adc's(Multiple is better for taking more samples/cycle) and a very capable dsp.

Cheers Mick

[chudster]

This is getting closer to a solution. We need an ecosystem, with rules for the development and it must motivate the participants.

Chudster

OK. There has been chatter on this thread.

Time for action.

I plan to call a hobbyists conference call via skype in the near future. The topic will be how we can set up an ecosystem to collaborate better and produce outcomes. We will of course be using a forum as a coordinating part of that strategy.

If you want to be invited to the call and as a screener please PM me addressing the following criteria within the next week:

1) Are you a metal detector company hater?
2) Are you affiliated with a metal detector company by relationship, employment or any commercial tie?
3) Why would you like to be involved in hobbyist a development 'collective' and what do you expect out of it?
4) What is your real name, location and time constraints (in your local time) in terms of a conference call?
5) What specific skills do you think you can bring to a group and give a little background on yourself.
6) Would you be happy for me to share your answers with members who are on the call?
7) Anything else you would like to share on the topic?
Do you have skype or need help to set it up?

Other than as you may answer 6, any information will be confidential.

There are a lot of folks out there and I intend to limit it to a core of six or so.

If you do not end up being on the call then don't worry, it is not the intention to exclude people in future (that includes MD company people) but we want to get like minded people together to get the ball rolling.

Chudster

[andyt]

Very interesting to read. I design products for companies independently.

I think one thing to bear in mind is that companies operate to make money and to maintain their own legal status in good order. They need to have a commercial reason to take someone to court, otherwise there is no point.

So why would a company take someone or another company to court?
1) They are competitive and by taking competitors and new startup companies to court they limit competition. It costs money to defend, the bigger you are the more money you have to do it...so you may want to crush startups before they have a chance of generating revenue to defend. To most engineers this is not what they went into engineering for, but it is the way many companies operate. Lets face it, once your core patents have expired your next legal line of defense is to use supplementary patents to stop the growth of startups and competitors.
2) Patent trolls, they will wait for companies to reach revenue then hit them and hope they will pay up. They are not interested in crushing companies, they want money from them. Unfortunately they also push many patents that should not have been issued and as a small company you cannot afford to go to court...so you are blackmailed. (They may of course want to put you out of business if they have a big key exclusive licensee royalty to protect)
3) If a "company A" licenses its IP to another "company B", the company licensing has a responsibility to police who uses the IP. If you have a great patent, you sell it to a "company B" for $500k, then you do nothing to stop "company C" from using it for free, then "company B" paid for competitive advantage and is not getting it. "Company B" may then want to take "Company A" to court to get their $500k back.

Now looking at the hobbiest, most companies will not worry too much about someone making a detector at home. But lets say you own the patent on a coil design, you license that design for a royalty to another company who makes coils for you. Now hobbiests start making and selling those coils? If you dont defend your patent rights against the hobbiests then the company who paid you for your coil design license could rightly feel upset. They thought they were buying exclusive rights...now they have competitors who dont even have to pay royalties. So a company may feel they need to defend their legal position by taking hobbiests to court if they are selling even small numbers of products that are competing with the rightful licensee.

I have no idea what the case is referred to in this thread so these comments are generalisations.

Ideally patents would be written in a clear way so that you could hold up the patents that have expired and the ones that havn't and know what is infringing or not. I had a quick look through some of the patents on this site, and it would be easy to conclude that discrimination was invented twenty times and received a patent 20 times.

The sad thing is that almost no small/startup company from USA or Europe would deliberately infringe a patent if the claims were clear. They want to create something new and make some money, they dont want to play legal punch and judy. But I have met many people in business who feel that you are stupid if you have legal muscle and dont use it to limit competition in any way possible.

I cannot see how any group of people have a hope of avoiding being taken to court (and surviving without significant legal backing) if they result in product pushed into the market that may infringe, unless they work very hard to ensure they do not in any way clash with these cryptic patents. In fact you would be making a single core target to take to court, which is easier for the lawyers...they dont want to take lots of single people to court, a collective...great.

I can see that such a group could attempt to identify what IP is now patent expired, and what the patents currently enforced cover. Along with potentially applying for new group patents for group inventions, or just providing publication of ideas so that a patent application could in future be invalidated by pre-publication. Though the latter would not stop you being taken to court either....just give you a defense!

[ivconic]

Hi folks,

but such a complex project can't work. You need a small group and have to work in a closed and protected environment (communication via emails).
Aziz

Bad idea, because whole traffic on the internet can be monitored, saved and misused. Same with any other way of digital communications.
Cell phones for example, too.
So if you have brilliant ideas and projects; than nothing is secure and sure except to keep them on "isolated" PC, away from any internet connection or networking.
I keep my works on such isolated system, that's why i have 5 machines at home. Only two are connected.
Also; you can't trust just anybody. Friends and pals from forums are not to be trusted 100%.
Some of those people you can trust but majority you can't.
There are "friends" who will sell you for a dime.
Third; even if those people are real friends; doesn't mean their systems are secure enough too.
There may be "leaks" in their system without they to know and be aware about that at all.
So nothing is secure enough. Industrial espionage is huge business.
For example: Minelab can pay funny money to some skilled hacker to infiltrate here and sniff out complete communication, emails too.
Not to mention various p2p and messengers, social networks and similar.
So, smart is to shut up and say nothing indeed important in public. Keep you works on isolated system.
If you must correspond to other people via network, than try to encrypt your data before sending it.
There are ways and methods.
Cheers!

[chudster]

Very interesting to read. I design products for companies independently.

I think one thing to bear in mind is that companies operate to make money and to maintain their own legal status in good order. They need to have a commercial reason to take someone to court, otherwise there is no point.

So why would a company take someone or another company to court?
1) They are competitive and by taking competitors and new startup companies to court they limit competition. It costs money to defend, the bigger you are the more money you have to do it...so you may want to crush startups before they have a chance of generating revenue to defend. To most engineers this is not what they went into engineering for, but it is the way many companies operate. Lets face it, once your core patents have expired your next legal line of defense is to use supplementary patents to stop the growth of startups and competitors.
2) Patent trolls, they will wait for companies to reach revenue then hit them and hope they will pay up. They are not interested in crushing companies, they want money from them. Unfortunately they also push many patents that should not have been issued and as a small company you cannot afford to go to court...so you are blackmailed. (They may of course want to put you out of business if they have a big key exclusive licensee royalty to protect)
3) If a "company A" licenses its IP to another "company B", the company licensing has a responsibility to police who uses the IP. If you have a great patent, you sell it to a "company B" for $500k, then you do nothing to stop "company C" from using it for free, then "company B" paid for competitive advantage and is not getting it. "Company B" may then want to take "Company A" to court to get their $500k back.

Now looking at the hobbiest, most companies will not worry too much about someone making a detector at home. But lets say you own the patent on a coil design, you license that design for a royalty to another company who makes coils for you. Now hobbiests start making and selling those coils? If you dont defend your patent rights against the hobbiests then the company who paid you for your coil design license could rightly feel upset. They thought they were buying exclusive rights...now they have competitors who dont even have to pay royalties. So a company may feel they need to defend their legal position by taking hobbiests to court if they are selling even small numbers of products that are competing with the rightful licensee.

I have no idea what the case is referred to in this thread so these comments are generalisations.

Ideally patents would be written in a clear way so that you could hold up the patents that have expired and the ones that havn't and know what is infringing or not. I had a quick look through some of the patents on this site, and it would be easy to conclude that discrimination was invented twenty times and received a patent 20 times.

The sad thing is that almost no small/startup company from USA or Europe would deliberately infringe a patent if the claims were clear. They want to create something new and make some money, they dont want to play legal punch and judy. But I have met many people in business who feel that you are stupid if you have legal muscle and dont use it to limit competition in any way possible.

I cannot see how any group of people have a hope of avoiding being taken to court (and surviving without significant legal backing) if they result in product pushed into the market that may infringe, unless they work very hard to ensure they do not in any way clash with these cryptic patents. In fact you would be making a single core target to take to court, which is easier for the lawyers...they dont want to take lots of single people to court, a collective...great.

I can see that such a group could attempt to identify what IP is now patent expired, and what the patents currently enforced cover. Along with potentially applying for new group patents for group inventions, or just providing publication of ideas so that a patent application could in future be invalidated by pre-publication. Though the latter would not stop you being taken to court either....just give you a defense!

andyt,

Thanks for your post. I don't have issue with what you say. My background is also innovation and commercialisation. There is a way to avoid this mess in future. If you look on the QED thread from post 304. http://www.geotech1.com/forums/showt...&highlight=qed there is more background for you. This is an unusual case.

[Sean_Goddard]

Minelab did that!?
No sympathies for Minelab any more!!
Minelab is history, fading to oblivion!
We enthusiasts and hobbyists can do something about that:
spread the word, do anti campaign and prevent people to waste money on their overpriced yet pretty average detectors.
War on Minelab, from now on!
...
XP rules!
XP is No1!

LameBin tried this legal route with me many years ago. SO....I scanned in ALL the documents I had marked "confidential" from their lawyers and posted them on the internet. THEN I posted links on every forum, discussion board and website I could find. Next thing I get a call from Gerry Brannigan (then LimeBan CEO) he is asking "WTF is this you've done to us and WHY"? I explained that this was all down to their idiot in Ireland Mr. Vachet. Needless to say I hit their sales because Mr. Brannigan was VERY apologetic and said that he completely agreed with my side of the issue. I got a WRITTEN apology signed by him and Vachet was removed from his position shortly afterwards.

REMEMBER THIS.. The ONE thing that REALLY hurts parasites and big companies is BAD PUBLICITY. Two can play dirty games, and I'm a meister at "hitting below the belt". If you want to hurt someone really badly, there's NO better place to hit them than in the wallet!

IMHO BW should just tell LimpBin to "Go do one" do what I did and splatter their pettiness all over the internet, fast and big. If you're gonna go down, best go down fighting, and in war ALL if fair!

BW's mistake was that he should have operated through an LLC which would have been sued. When it was found that the company had no assets (was just a front) the suee(?!?) gets a nice big bill from their lawyers, nothing out of the shell company and a bitter taste from having spent a load of $$$$ for no return . Simple tactic and IT WORKS!!

[Aziz]

That's very interesting Sean! Thanks for sharing your experience.
Cheers,
Aziz

[ivconic]

LameBin tried this legal route with me many years ago. SO....I scanned in ALL the documents I had marked "confidential" from their lawyers and posted them on the internet. THEN I posted links on every forum, discussion board and website I could find. Next thing I get a call from Gerry Brannigan (then LimeBan CEO) he is asking "WTF is this you've done to us and WHY"? I explained that this was all down to their idiot in Ireland Mr. Vachet. Needless to say I hit their sales because Mr. Brannigan was VERY apologetic and said that he completely agreed with my side of the issue. I got a WRITTEN apology signed by him and Vachet was removed from his position shortly afterwards.

REMEMBER THIS.. The ONE thing that REALLY hurts parasites and big companies is BAD PUBLICITY. Two can play dirty games, and I'm a meister at "hitting below the belt". If you want to hurt someone really badly, there's NO better place to hit them than in the wallet!

IMHO BW should just tell LimpBin to "Go do one" do what I did and splatter their pettiness all over the internet, fast and big. If you're gonna go down, best go down fighting, and in war ALL if fair!

BW's mistake was that he should have operated through an LLC which would have been sued. When it was found that the company had no assets (was just a front) the suee(?!?) gets a nice big bill from their lawyers, nothing out of the shell company and a bitter taste from having spent a load of $$$$ for no return . Simple tactic and IT WORKS!!

Well said!
That is kind a attitude that i can only agree with.
From very respectful company seems they turned to real globalistic parasite lately!
I've been long enough in this to notice and follow their "progressing curve" and am more than disappointed.
Cheers!

[Aziz]

Well said!
That is kind a attitude that i can only agree with.
From very respectful company seems they turned to real globalistic parasite lately!
I've been long enough in this to notice and follow their "progressing curve" and am more than disappointed.
Cheers!

I've seen a much longer post today.
I shouldn't smoke the stuff I'm used to...

Cheers,
Aziz

[ivconic]

I've seen a much longer post today.
I shouldn't smoke the stuff I'm used to...

Cheers,
Aziz

I edited it and deleted my usual bs!
My too fast tongue will kill me one day!
BTW Maria Anna is good companion in these business, brings up fresh ideas!
But this time is not up to her!

[Sean_Goddard]

The BOTTOM LINE is this...

All BW has to do is IGNORE LameNib, do as I stated in my previous post and write them a polite letter stating that THEY have to prove infringement AND that they have suffered a loss of business as a result (ask to see the SPECIFIC accounting which CLEARLY shows this loss).

LambBie will spend so much time fabricating evidence that they will most likely give up. remember, THEY are the ones spending the $$$$ at this point to prove a LIE in a CIVIL COURT..

Now, look at that last statement...CIVIL, NOT CRIMINAL which means if BW chooses NOT to take part in what is a pathetic attempt to litigate competition out of existence by a FAILING company then NO ONE on earth can MAKE him comply. the burden of proof is THEIRS, NOT his.. he is INNOCENT until THEY can prove 100% beyond ALL reasonable doubt that he has infringed upon their patent (which is probably a rehash of someone else's anyhow knowing those involved).

What they are trying to do is scare him out of business or make him run to an expensive lawyer and deprive him of the funds he needs to get off the ground. LET THEM DO NEITHER. They are pathetic bullies who will soon be in court filing for bankruptcy if they carry on like this.

Put the boot on the other foot.. If this was Whites, they would be offering to HELP the guy by producing the machine under license. THAT is the difference and THAT is why I will ALWAYS buy Whites over poorly made Limeban rubbish ANYDAY!

Now I can TRULY say... BOYCOTT ML NOW....SPREAD THE WORD!!!

OR....

Even BETTER...

If EVERYONE on this forum contributes a fund to BW to help him get the design off the ground ( BW forms an LLC with ALL contributors listed as Directors) ML can't sue ALL of us if we got say 250 ppl, but we COULD fund a counter-sue motion citing their re-hash patents. We've got the evidence let's GET THEM ON THE RUN!!!! $100 per pop would make them spend 10 times that defending their patents as the USPO and others would go back and review them. ML would have to submit modified versions to cover themselves. This would cost MORE.

FYI Patent protection DOESN'T cost thousands, you can get it FREE..Here's how.... file in the UK under a provisional application and you are granted 364 days protection AUTOMATICALLY as "PATENT PENDING". TWO WEEKS BEFORE the expiry, you re-file a modified document with slightly different claims. BINGO another 364 days FREE protection..SWEET. If I can remember which form it is to use I will post here later.

How's THAT for dirty fighting ML? Pick a fight with my friends, you pick a fight with ME!