Manchester City's intellectual property

The annual report of Manchester City football club states that in the year to 31 May 2013 they made £47 million from selling "intellectual property". Of this, £22.5 million was sales to related parties, and £24.5 million from selling to third parties, such as, perhaps, a rumoured New York franchise. No other details were disclosed.

These helped bring their losses down from £97.1 million to £51.6 million. Their revenue was £271 million, up from £231 million. The wage bill of £233 million helps account for the loss. And sounds huge to me ! There were also big losses in buying and selling players (that is, they were paying a lot more than they were receiving).

But what is the intellectual property of the club ? Some may be sponsorship and partnership deals with companies such as Nike and Etihad Airways, but much I guess is trade marks in the form of sportswear and other items where the club sells rights to use the club regalia in return for, probably, royalties, or perhaps for cash sums. Hence you can buy their shirts as made by clothing companies in sports wear shops and the like.

In 1972 Manchester City applied for the following, still current, trade mark.

This was for six classes. You don't just register for everything, but for specified goods or services in specified classes. The idea is to allow different owners to use say Swan for different activities, so long as they don't conflict. Nobody expects a maker of matches to rent cars as well. In this case, Class 6 with key rings and key chains turns up, as it nearly always does for sports clubs and bands, as they are cheap memorabilia.

In 1997 they applied for this modified version. Still the ship, but no rose. It has less detail which makes it easier to reproduce clearly on small items.

This time there were 9 classes, which include such items as teddy bears, romper suits and baby boots. If you think you might sell it, just put it in, as failure to do so could mean someone trying to sell it.

Also in 1997, there was a version using the club's Latin motto, superbia in proelio. It means "Pride in battle".

And there is a colour version as well. Judging from the Manchester City FC website this is the favoured, modern version.

MCFC, Man City and Manchester City F.C. have also been registered, among other variants. This is a complete list of the UK registered trade marks. The same eagle is Manchester's symbol as a city, it seems, as the City Council registered it for many uses in 2008 as EU 6804462 through the pan-European EU system, as shown below.

Such registrations only cover the UK, and big sports clubs are global in their ambitions nowadays, especially with syndicated broadcasts and the reach of the Internet. The same colour insignia shown above was only published for "opposition", prior to registration, in the USA on the 21 January 2014, having been filed for in 2012. Many foreign countries were designated in a filing for the same, also in 2012, through the Madrid Agreement, which is an international treaty.

Hence we have football, business and intellectual property all coming together.

Humidity as a source of power

I have just received a Gizmag e-mail telling me about, among other things, Could humidity power join the list of renewable energy sources ?

It tells the story of Dr Ozgur Sahin of Columbia University and his discovery that tiny bacteria coated silicon "planks" reacted to changes in humidity. Before he got a chance to examine the planks under a microscope, he could see the planks visibly bend. The force exerted was one thousand times that of a human muscle. What was happening was that Bacillus subtilis was drying up to a husk when it was very dry which can occur naturally, and then coming back to life when water is restored to the atmosphere. He realised that he had come across a new source of energy harvesting.

The story was presumably timed to coincide with the electronic publication (for paying subscribers) on the 26 January 2014 of a "letter" on the discovery in Nature nanotechnology, which is summarised at Bacillus spores as building blocks for stimuli-responsive materials and nanogenerators. Sahin was joined by three other authors in writing the paper.

Out of curiosity I looked and found that a World patent application had been published as long ago as May 2012, Bacterial spore based energy system, by Sahin on behalf of Harvard and, unusually, Sahin himself as co-applicants. The specification contains 28 pages of text on the concept. And all free to look at.

Normally these "World applications" are coded A1 and have a search report listing what has been done before. This A2 was published without a search report, but the A3 with a list of background references only, not judged to be similar, was published as WO 2012071426 A3. The 5 patent documents it refers to can be seen on this list.

The problem presumably will be scaling up the idea to produce sizeable amounts of power. This will include genetic engineering to make bacteria which react even better to the humidity changes.

Discussion on genes and patents

The British Library is hosting a discussion on genes and patents on 4 March, Talkscience: patently obvious ?

Four speakers will take questions from the audience in Cafe Scientifique style in the British Library's terrace restaurant. The theme is controversial: are genes patentable, or are they really discoveries ? Do patents encourage or hinder research and commercialisation ? The lure of money is strong, and may attract research, but being told that a patent blocks industrialising a technique is discouraging, to put it mildly.

Much more than in mechanical or electrical engineering, these are knotty problems, as the genes are actually there already -- unless modified ? I will be going, and will listen to the arguments with interest.

The discussion will be chaired by Dr Jackie Hunter, Chief Executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. The others giving short speeches, and then responding to question, will be Professor Alan Ashworth, Chief Executive of the Institute of Cancer Research; Dr Nick Bourne of Cardiff University; and Berwyn Clarke, Chairman of NALIA Systems Limited.

Ashworth was in the team that discovered and patented the BRCA2 gene, the gene for breast cancer. I learnt something on investigating: I was aware of Myriad's claim to having discovered it, but apparently there was a rival team that have posted their flag. This is a list of the 41 "World" patent applications that mention BRCA2 in their abstract. That's just for the one gene ! Also, as a patent searcher, I am aware that keyword searching alone rarely finds all the relevant material.

It's not a field I was involved with much when I worked at the British Library, as most of my clientele were private inventors or small companies, and they tended to be involved with non-biological inventions.

I look forward to learning a lot on the evening.

The patents for e-cigarettes

Electronic or e-cigarettes are designed to aid smoking cessation by being a replacement. Users still get the nicotine kick, but without the tar-related side effects. Its rapid growth has been helped, if not necessarily caused, by the widespread bans on smoking in public places such as bars, restaurants and workplaces.

Now the UK government has announced that it wants to stop its sale to under 18 year olds, which will be its first restriction in the country.

The first patent specification is widely attributed to A non-smokable electronic aerosol cigarette, filed in 2003 -- which is in Chinese. This invention, by Hon Lik, a Chinese pharmacist, used a piezoelectric ultrasound-emitting element to vaporise a pressurized jet of liquid containing nicotine diluted in a propylene glycol solution. The smoke-like vapour is inhaled so that nicotine is delivered into the bloodstream via the lungs. Propylene glycol dilutes nicotine and places it in a disposable plastic cartridge which serves as a liquid reservoir and mouthpiece. The drawing is given below.

A different design, though, was used in the electronic cigarettes that were first introduced to the Chinese domestic market in May 2004 as an aid for smoking cessation and replacement. The company that Hon Lik worked for, Golden Dragon Holdings, changed its name to Ruyan (which means "Resembling smoking"), and started exporting its products in 2005. They have a number of patents. This is a list of US patent documents (some for designs rather than utility) by Hon Lik.

An important variant, and improvement, is the "cartomizer", which was invented by brothers Umer and Tariq (“Taz”) Sheikh, from Woking, Surrey. They had worked in IT recruitment but soon realised, Umer has said, that “rather than working for someone else and making them lots of money, we would do it for ourselves,” and formed their own company in that business. A smoking ban in enclosed work places in England was to come into force in 2007, and Umer wanted to quit smoking, so the brothers decided to "have a punt" and to invent a product for the market.

They worked with an engineering team in China to develop a prototype. In 2008 they filed for what was patented in the UK as A method and apparatus related to electronic smoking-substitute devices, with a US application pending, and is sold as the Gamucci brand, which is growing fast. The Gamucci website has the slogan "Like smoking, only better." The heating coil is integrated into the liquid chamber. This is instead of the original three components: a cartridge containing a nicotine dilution, an atomisation device and a battery. It has been named as the first European electronic cigarette. The above information on the Sheikhs is largely based on the interesting article in City AM, Brothers who took a punt on a new market. The drawing from their patent is given below.

While e-cigarettes are promoted as a way for smokers to control or even stop smoking, there are concerns that it could be a way for young people to take up smoking. Many electronic cigarettes look like “the real thing”. Worries about possible health risks have led to some countries talking of restricting its use, as in the UK. Others argue that they are as safe as other nicotine replacement products such as patches. Another problem is that someone told off for smoking in a non-smoking area may be innocently “smoking” an electronic cigarette.

A forerunner, though not actually an “electronic” cigarette, was Herbert Gilbert’s Smokeless non-tobacco cigarette, filed in 1963. A nicotine solution was heated and steam came out of the smoker’s lips. Gilbert was approached by companies interested in commercialising his invention, but this did not come about. Its drawings are given below.

Aquion's battery to store renewable energy

MIT's Technology review has an article titled Startup thinks its battery will solve renewable energy's big flaw, by Kevin Bullis.

The flaw is that using renewables for power demand means a dangerous reliance on the wind blowing and the sun shining. The ability to store excess power for use when supply is low is, to put it mildly, fundamental in any big move towards renewables.

Now Aquion Energy has installed, at an old Sony TV plant near Pittsburgh, an assembly line for non-toxic batteries. Samples are being sent out to potential customers for evaluation. $55 million has been raised by the company, which was formed in 2008, and production is expected in the Spring of 2014.

The article quotes Jay Whitacre, the Carnegie Mellon University professor of materials science who led the research effort, as saying that the new batteries cost as much as lead-acid batteries, the cheapest around, but last more than twice as long.

Sodium-ions instead of conventional lithium-ions are used. The battery is ideal for isolated locations or for use at power plant locations, but because sodium-ions are less efficient in storing by weight or volume than lithium-ions, the batteries are not practical in for example a car or a phone because of the bulk required.

There are five "World patent" applications by Jay Whitacre for Aquion Energy. The most recent, published in September 2013, is titled Large format electrochemical energy storage device housing and module.

Here is a video featuring Whitacre talking about the company.

i-hut®: the seriously cool caravan

i-hut® is the trade mark of what the company calls a "seriously cool caravan". It is made of wood which to me gives a Scandinavian look, and is designed so that it can function as a second home. 

UK law allows certain designs to be classed as temporary so that they can be sited in, for example, your garden without the need to ask for planning permission. Although really a structure, the i-hut® has wheels and a towbar so it can go anywhere with planning permission for a caravan. The website gives lots of details including photographs. 

The brochure I have in my hand, most of which is reproduced on the website, states that

The i-hut name and logo is a registered Trade Mark and the i-hut design is registered at the Patents Office. If you try to pinch it, we'll set the dogs on you !

It is commendable that a company takes so much interest in its intellectual property. Maybe the dogs are a bit much. It is in fact the Patent Office, not the Patents Office, and I would have preferred to have seen the familiar ® logo attached to each use of the trade mark, which is indeed registered for the UK for caravans and other classes, in the brochure and the website. I also prefer to see specific design or patent numbers listed. 

I found two relevant UK registered designs for the distinctive look. Below is the drawing page sent in for UK Design 4021158.

Below is the drawing page sent in for UK Design 4021159. 

They were by Charteroak Estates, who also registered the trade mark. 

There are two models, with each available as a road legal or non road legal version. Full use is made of space above head level, in the apex of the roof, for storage or sleeping. The longer version is 36 feet long and the shorter 18 feet. The costs run from just under £30,000 to £45,000 plus optional extras. 

The need for space is of course paramount in cramped spaces such as caravans or small yachts. This is why the idea of a room that slides out when the caravan is at rest has become popular. An example, given below, is taken from US2006117673. 

Here is a list of some US patent specifications for slide-out provision in "recreational vehicles". 

The top brands in 2013: YouGov's BrandIndex

Today's City AM free newspaper had an article about the top brands of 2013 in the UK. It was taken from a source I'd never heard of before: YouGov's BrandIndex website.

Thousands of interviews are carried out daily to identify the best known brands. The UK brand rankings listed as the top ten:

1.iplayer [broadcasting]
2 John Lewis [retailer]
2 Samsung [electronics]
4 Aldi [food retailer]
5 Dyson [consumer products]
6 Marks and Spencer [retailer]
7 bbc.co.uk [broadcasting]
8 Waitrose [food retailer]
9 Sainsbury's [food retailer]
10 YouTube

No Apple, as the newspaper article pointed out (it was no. 6 last year).

The top 25 US brand rankings, of which the top ten are:

1 Amazon [online retailer]
2 Ford [car manufacturer]
3 Subway [takeout food retailer]
4 History [broadcasting]
5 Lowe's [retailer]
6 YouTube [broadcasting]
7 Walgreens [retailer]
8 V8 [vegetable drinks]
9 Cheerios [breakfast cereal]
10 Kindle [e-book reader]

Again no Apple.

Older figures are given, and even rankings within sectors. A dozen other countries such as Germany, France, China and Japan are also available.

It is clear that "brand" is widely interpreted, and while some of the names or words are trademarked some may not be. I'm very surprised that online sites such as Amazon aren't more prominent for the UK. Samsung's strength in the UK doesn't surprise me -- I myself have one of their Android phones (it could work better, though) and one of their laptops. A lot depends on how the interviews are conducted -- do those interviewed volunteer names or are they prompted, is it only knowing a brand rather than approving of it that matters. I must admit I'm amazed a breakfast cereal made it into the top ten for the US.

The site is worth exploring -- there's a list of the top five social media sites for the US, for example.

Nest Labs' patents

Google has announced a takeover of Palo Alto-based Nest Labs, paying $3.2 billion.

It was only founded in 2010, by Tony Fadell, who had been Senior Vice President of Apple's iPod Division. While building an energy-efficient house he was frustrated by the limitations of thermostats. The company started, almost inevitably, in a garage.

This is yet another indication that Google is expanding into high-tech areas. Nest Labs is a designer of thermostats with a difference: the Nest Learning Thermostat, a smart device that can perform a variety of functions, to help create an intelligent or smart house.

In December 2013, for example, they were granted the US patent Dynamic distributed-sensor thermostat network for forecasting external events. Here is one of its drawings.

Here is another drawing from the same patent, showing the whole house wired up.

Much of their work is based on assessing occupancy in rooms to reduce energy usage, as in Occupancy pattern detection, estimation and prediction, illustrated below.

This is a list of the US granted patents published in their name, with the two at the top published only the 14 January, yesterday, and hence not yet available on the Espacenet database. Eleven were published in 2012. There is an overlap with the US patents applications published from 2012.

The company does not restrict itself to thermostats. Their smoke detector is discussed in a New Yorker article by Matt Buchanan, Can smart design make you love their smoke detector ?

This is a list of granted US patents by Tony Fadell.

Below is a video of a (half hour)  interview with Fadell.

Toy tank inventions from World War I

Toys invented during a war often reflect that war. Tank toys in World War I are an example, and here are some patents as illustrations. I looked through both British and American patents.,

In November 1916, a patent application was made at the British Patent Office for this design, as illustrated below by the American equivalent patent:

The British document, accepted for publication in August 1917, was titled Improved mechanical toy and was by Duncan Rice, who described himself as "No. 522,853 Canadian Army Medical Corps, a Private in the Canadian Army at present stationed in France and at present attached to Headquarters of the Third Canadian Divisional Ammunition Column." As a corporal he applied, just after the war ended, for a combined shaver and stropper, GB130872. Meanwhile, the US patent for the toy did not get published until 1920, as Toy. He only applied for it in May 1919, from Aberdeen.

How did Rice know about the tank ? The first use of tanks by the British was in September 1916, before the first significant use of tanks at the Battle of Cambrai, in November 1917.

In date order of application, the next one to be filed was in January 1918 from New York City. The inventor was Koh Ono, who said he was a Japanese citizen. The patent, "Toy", was published as US1364513 and is illustrated below. It has considerably more detail than the Rice patent.

In February 1918 there was GB121848 was filed by William Ellis Pickford, a company director in Sheffield. It was for a "military tank" to be ridden by the child. Below is a view from above.



Again in February 1918 there was Toy tank-car by Robert Potter Breese of New York City. It is illustrated below.

Next, on March 1918, there was Toy fighting-tank by Walter Huth of Chicago, IL. In it he mentions that it was made to "resemble the so-called tanks now in use by the British Army in France."The illustration below is from the patent.

In September 1918, a couple of months before the end of the war, was US1294237 by Edward Cloonan of St Louis, MO.

Further toy tank patents followed, for years all or most using the same general design of a vehicle with guns on the side instead of the now standard frontal view. A rare toy showing the general appearance of the now conventional tank dates backs to March 1919, by toolmaker William Osman of East Ham, as illustrated below. It is, apparently, based on the French Renault FT model.




What impact did these militaristic toys have on the children, one wonders. It would have made them more interested in the military, as war-related toys and games generally flourished in World War I. 

How precise should patent searches be ? Purring pillows

Before I retired, I interviewed or received instructions for numerous patent searches, and frequently the clients were unaware of what they actually wanted.

They might sound sure, but did that mean that they really understood what they needed ? They might ask for a search to see if an invention is patentable, but many do not understand what is essential to achieve that. They usually understand that it has to be new, but may focus on incidentals like saying that the search must be for a certain device which is "light, or portable" -- besides the fact that "light" can mean illumination as well as an absence of weight, it is what the device actually does that should be looked for. The general concept itself may not be of a patentable nature. Someone once asked me if making a known device much larger meant that a monopoly could be secured for just that -- I replied no, it's obvious and hence not permitted. He was amazed.

It is always recommended that someone thinking of applying for a patent consults a patent attorney -- and while some searching may be done before that visit, a search, if possible based on their recommendations, should be carried out after the consultation. There's no harm in the novice having a go so long as it's understood that not finding anything doesn't mean it's not in the patents, it may simply be hard to find.

Even then, the attorney is unlikely to be aware of the linguistic and classification challenges involved. Suppose an inventor says that the invention is for a purring pillow to encourage sleepiness. Can't it be any sort of animal noise ? Indeed, any method of generating sound using the outlined technology ? If a patent application says it's for pillows it means, even if the method is new, it is only protected for pillows. Could the search at least be extended to neck supports or soft toys, for example. In addition, it often turns out that the inventor just has the basic idea and doesn't know how to describe a working example -- in which case a patent is likely to be denied, or will be worthless.

Having said that, there would certainly be no harm in looking for purring pillows to show what sort of concepts were already out there and hence not patentable.

There is for example Purring pillow apparatus by Scott Flack of Illinois, published in 2003. Here is its main illustration.



There were three citations to it, where the examiner found previous patent specifications, including the delightfully titled Austrian specification Katzenschnurr Therapiegerat. 

Those citations can be found in the bibliographic format for this patent specification as "Cited documents" (on the left). This application, incidentally, did not progress beyond the published application stage as the only document listed is one starting with 2003 and not a document in say an 8 million number range -- prefixes using the year are applications, it's the other series which have enforceable patent rights in the USA.

In the same format there are three classifications. Only the "cooperative" class is a clickable link, H04R 5/023, which is for stereophonic arrangements for a chair or pillow. It's used by ticking the little box next to it, then (on left) "Find patents" (to find the 838 with that class) or, more usefully, "Copy to search form". This means that additional terms can be added -- such as, say "purring or cat? or animal? or feline" to the second box in the search mask, where both title and summary are searched. ? means that an extra letter, normally an s, can be searched for.

This gives a list of five hits, and at this stage I would study the wording used, to see if the strategy needs to be revised; look at the first description page, to see if it mentions previous work (this is common among private inventors and small companies); and again look at the citations. Any patent specifications I found relevant would have their star ticked to change from black to red so that they appear in the Patents list for more detailed study or listing later on.

These cooperative or CPC classes are not printed on the patent specifications (this is likely to change soon) and will be mainly Western inventions, while the other classes are printed there. CPC as in this case is often a more precise class than the "international" or IPC class, which can also be looked up in the CPC schedules, and is this case are:

H04R 1/02, transducer casings
H04R 5/02, constructional arrangements of loudspeakers
H04R 9/06, loudspeakers

It might be thought a good idea to combine one of those classes (in the IPC box on the search mask) with words such as pillow, cat, etc. Relying just on CPC means that huge amounts of Far East patent documents are not searched. It typically takes 6-12 months for English titles and/ or summaries to be included in the Espacenet database, which is a problem which in theory can be tackled using automatic translation patent databases.

Running a search may be quick, but a variety of searches, each improved or perhaps covering different aspects of the invention, need to be thought through and built. In my career as a patent searcher I never relied on free databases but rather used them as a useful starting point to get an idea of how much was likely to be found, to get a feel for wording that ought to be used, and (if little seemed to exist) to use citations to find older ("cited") or newer ("citing") patent documents referring to the one I knew about. Citations are particularly useful when it is hard to describe how an invention works, as the patent examiners have done much of the work for you. First, though, you have to find a relevant document.

Ideally, of course, the inventor would have been persuaded to augment the search for purring pillows by also searching for how the mechanism worked. Also, the inventor should assist the searcher by explaining terms likely to be used in the industry and hence in relevant patents. I was often struck by how often the novice would wave a piece of electrical apparatus around and say that he had improved it, only to admit he didn't know what it was called when I asked. If he didn't know, how was I supposed to know....

Is all of this easy, or quick ? I would respectfully say no on both counts. I vividly remember the son of a lady client coming in and, in her silent and rather horrified presence, angrily berating me for having the temerity to charge £137 for a search, as he said that patent searching wasn't "rocket science".

He was right. It's often far more complicated.