Monthly Archive: April 2021

An old adage says there are always two sides to every story and this is certainly true about the life and controversial career of inventor Jerome Lemelson.  What makes his tale so different from other public, polarizing figures is that the arguments traded between his admirers and his detractors concerning his use of the US patent system reflect, in a microcosm, two dramatically different points-of-view about how inventions and intellectual property should be governed in society.

When one thinks of the great inventors of American history, one might conjure up Thomas Edison or George Eastman or Samuel Westinghouse.  Each of these men is famous for bringing to market, some device or machine that changed the way we live.  For example, George Eastman, dissatisfied by his experiences getting a photographic portrait, invented photographic film and the first portable camera and revolutionized how we record history, be it the small, private kind we each enjoy or the collective, public kind that shapes the doings of the world.  However, it is rare to find a person for whom the name Jerome Lemelson is even known let alone a household name, on par with those listed above, despite the fact that Lemelson holds approximately 600 US patents, making him one of the most prolific patent holders in the world.

That portion of the world that does know him divides into two very diverse camps.  His admirers think him a visionary who made our modern life possible.  His detractors think him a hoarder who gamed the US patent system and, perhaps, was a forerunner of the modern patent troll.

The pro-Lemelson side is succinctly presented in the Smithsonian book Little Explorer - Jerome Lemelson: the Man Behind Industrial Robots, by Lucia Raatma. (Note similar stories are told in the book Inventors You Should Know: Profiles for Kids, by Sam Simon– both are available on scribd.com)

The book provides a brief biographical sketch noting that Lemelson, born July 18, 1923 in Staten island New York, earned an engineering degree from New York University despite having his studies interrupted by service in World War II.  After graduating, Lemelson started in a typical salaried engineering job before striking out on his own as an inventor.  The book claims Lemelson’s most successful invention as the universal robot that would use one of his earlier patents on machine vision, which Lemelson imagined as a computer analyzing images from a video camera, to study a task and then “figure out the best way to complete it”.

Raatma also spends some time talking about Lemelson’s approach to business.  She says of his licensing and patent prosecution efforts that “an important part of being an inventor is licensing one’s ideas.  People can’t buy new items if they don’t know they exist.”  To that end he founded the Licensing Management Corporation to “sell his ideas” and to file lawsuits to protect his intellectual capital.  The money he derived was then returned to the community in the form of philanthropy designed to help budding inventors.

A more critical looks at Lemelson’s career is found in A History of Inventing in New Jersey: From Edison to the Ice Cream Cone, by Linda J. Barth.   She concedes that, despite his philanthropy, his career mostly consisted of filing patents and suing companies and customers who, allegedly infringed them, an approach she was clearly uncomfortable with.  Barth characterizes him as “not conduct[ing] much laboratory or manufacturing work” and she relates the following anecdote to drive home the point that much of his activity centered on litigation.

In her closing paragraphs, Barth writes

In the article Down but Not Out, R.  P.  Siegel points out that Lemelson’s inventions were “often so far ahead of their time that, in many cases, the technology required to build them did not yet exist.” Siegel also goes on to say that “a big part of Lemelson’s success was that he filed patent applications that remained pending for decades, and delayed work to his advantage.” Since patent applications remain hidden until the patent is granted, decades of delay on Lemelson’s part meant that other companies would unintentionally ‘re-invent the wheel’ by bringing a similar idea to market only to find later that they were subject to an accusation of patent infringement.

These so-called submarine patents enabled Lemelson’s Licensing Management Corporation to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from companies around the world.  Siegel cites that Las Vegas Judge Phillip M. Pro, who ruled 14 of Lemelson’s patents as “invalid and unenforceable” partially due to the submarine aspect but partially for lack of enablement, which means that no person skilled in the art could produce the device based on the teaching of the specification.  According to Jesse Jenner, the lead attorney representing Cognex, a company that disputed Lemelson’s claims of patent infringement, “these … rulings assert that no one, including Lemelson’s himself, ever built the machine vision system or bar-code scanner he licensed to thousands of companies.”

The idea that Lemelson’s patents are fraudulent is vocalized most forcefully by Mike Masnick, in a post entitled Lemelson’s Legacy: Great Inventor or Patent Hoarder, in which he characterizes Lemelson as a “complete fraud” who hoarded ideas and patents that effectively held companies, who actually did innovate and perform the hard work needed to bring a product to market, for ransom.  Masnick concludes by describing Lemelson as being “more a science fiction writer than an inventor” and that “crediting Lemelson with machine vision is like saying Jules Verne invented space travel.”

So, what to make of Lemelson?  In the process of wrestling with the facts surrounding his career, one must inevitably ask what the role of idea versus industry is in the economy.  Certainly, having a good idea is a commodity that should reap an economic reward and one’s immediate sympathy most likely goes to the ‘idea holder’ and, by all accounts, Lemelson had ideas.  But a bit of reflection should walk one away from the perspective that the ‘idea holder’ is pre-eminent.  If it is simply a matter of having an idea a without having the will power and means to bring it to fruition, then Lemelson should not be credited with the invention of the industrial robot anymore than anyone else who came after GK Chesterton.

Chesterton, who cared little for machines and industry and modern economies, introduced the concept of the robot in his short story The Invisible Man, in 1911, roughly two decades before Lemelson was ever born.  In this story, Chesterton foresees a future layered littered with mechanical helpers:

A critic might be inclined to point out that Lemelson did more that have an idea, since one can’t just patent an idea, but that point is fairly well retired by both the Corn Flakes anecdote above and the fact that, as Judge Pro ruled, many of Lemelson’s patents could not actually be used to build a device that achieved the idea.

Sad to say, it seems that Lemelson’s usual bag of tricks was to dream up an idea any futurist might have and then to slap just enough ‘hard science’ onto it to serve as a fig leaf covering the basic fact that his ideas were naked.  He then seems to use the strategy in dragging his applications out until real inventors, independently having similar ideas, caught technology up to the point where an actual device were possible.  At that point, Lemelson surfaces and sues real innovators who had never heard of either him or his shadow idea.  This is clearly not an actual desirable good in society and any economic rewards along these lines merely incentivizes more of the same and more waste on the part of individuals and companies that really invent.  Thankfully, Congress put an end to the submarine patent with the Uruguay Round Agreement Act in June 8, 1995.  Hopefully we won’t see another Lemelson as long as we live.

Human behavior.  There is simply no way to avoid thinking about human behavior when talking about either politics or economics.  The political side makes assumptions and then argues about what is right and proper and ought to happen.  The economic side observes and then poses questions about the best way to answer how much, who makes, and who consumes.  The political sphere tends to value emotion over data, and the cost of each decision is ‘obvious’ and ‘visceral’ and ‘in your face’.  In economics, the situation is reversed, with hard facts trumping knee-jerk reactions, and where the costs of each decision are often ‘hidden’ and ‘counter-intuitive’.  And yet both disciplines deal with the same underlying enigma – human beings.  As a result, it is almost always the case that there is spillover between the two sides, in which the salt water from the political ocean mixes with the fresh water from economic rivers that fed it to form a sort of brackish overlap.

This past month saw a particularly interesting ‘brackish’ situation emerge surrounding one of the most colorful characters in literature, Theodore Seuss Geisel aka Dr. Seuss.

According to Wikipedia, Ted Geisel authored over 60 children’s books.  According to the stack of books that once adorned the shelves in my own children’s room, we owned nearly all of them.  There’s no denying that Dr. Seuss was a common fixture for many when learning to read.  There’s also no denying that as many of us transitioned to adulthood, our childhood love of the perennial favorites The Cat in the Hat, The Lorax, Fox in Socks, and Horton Hears a Who! came along for the ride (not to mention our yearly need to see the Grinch in the weeks leading up to Christmas).  Seuss’ work resulted in numerous movies, TV shows, and related media (including a hilarious reading of Green Eggs and Ham by Jesse Jackson on Saturday Night Live).  Dr. Seuss wove himself and his eccentrically drawn characters into the fabric of American life (but just how deeply will be discussed below).

It is against this backdrop that a controversy erupted early in March when the publisher, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, announced that they would no longer be printing the following 6 titles:

• And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,
• If I Ran the Zoo,
• McElligot's Pool,
• On Beyond Zebra!,
• Scrambled Eggs Super!, and
• The Cat's Quizzer.

This sparked a political firestorm on both sides of the spectrum, but the controversy lasted far shorter than the publishers most likely had hoped.  But before arguing the underlying facts that support this, admittedly, provocative conclusion, let’s look at what the politics had to say in order to better understand how their emotional response provided cover for what was most assuredly a savvy economic move on the part of Dr. Seuss Enterprises.

According to Yahoo! News in a piece they published on March 2^nd entitled Six Dr. Seuss Books to Stop Being Published Due to Racist Imagery: 'Hurtful and Wrong', Dr. Seuss Enterprises has decided to stop publishing the list of 6 books by the late author because of “racist and insensitive imagery.”  The article went on to quote the publisher saying that the titles in question:

Newsweek, in their short piece entitled Banned Seuss Site Emerges to Promote Dr. Seuss' Six Canceled Books, cites a 2019 study published in Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, which concluded that

According to Newsweek, the study describes anti-Blackness as discrimination, opposition or hostility against Blackness and Black people.

On the other side of the political spectrum, local radio commentators complained about cancel culture, and wondered how the cancel culture could accuse the man who put environmentalism front and center in The Lorax, and tolerance despite outward differences as the central theme in The Sneetches, of being racist.

Of all the media outlets, the NY times, in its piece entitled Dr. Seuss Books Are Pulled, and a ‘Cancel Culture’ Controversy Erupts, comes closest to identifying what was really going on.  After stating that:

the Times finally points out to its readership that

And there you have it: the decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises (DSE) was nothing more than a clever marketing ploy.  DSE could have simply stopped printing underselling books, but they knew that a perceived ban would trigger responses from both sides generating loads of free publicity.  They timed their announcement to coincide with National Reading Day, which is March 2^nd, a date previously chosen to coincide with Ted Geisel’s own birthday.

And their ploy worked like a charm.  The price of the ‘forbidden fruit’ rose so fast on Ebay that, as CBR notes in its article entitled 'Banned' Dr. Seuss Books Delisted on eBay After Selling for Thousands,

The only thing lacking in DSE’s plan was the ability to control the duration that a fickle and easily-distracted public either would stay outraged by ‘cancel culture’ run amok or would remain bitter towards perceived injustice.  The controversy ended far too quickly to likely sustain an increased jump in sales but that doesn’t really matter.  What does matter is that the roots of the controversy were planted firmly in the bedrock of economic analysis and not in the political winds that blow this way and that.