What has wound up Trevor Bayliss?

Davey Winder
Thursday, 03 September 2009 18:00

IT Policy - Regulation

Trevor Bayliss is perhaps most famous for inventing the wind-up radio, but now he's getting wound up about intellectual property rights.

In 1989 British inventor Bayliss was watching a TV programme about AIDS in Africa which mentioned how radio educational broadcasts could help stop the disease spreading. The prototype for the wind-up radio was completed before that television programme ended.

The patent was filed in 1992 and the Freeplay radio eventually became a reality. Bayliss went on to achieve commercial success and acclaim, before establishing the Trevor Bayliss Foundation in order to promote invention by supporting inventors.

Now Bayliss is calling upon the British Government to change patent law in order to strengthen the protection for inventors against theft of their intellectual property.

Whereas UK law currently requires anyone who believes that someone has stolen an idea to pursue their case through the civil courts, which can be costly and fraught with difficulty, Bayliss wants to make things less costly and less complicated for garden shed inventors.

Bayliss told the BBC that "If I was to nick your car, which is worth £10,000, say, I could go to jail, but if I were to nick your patent, which is worth a million pounds, you'd have to sue me".

Indeed, as Bayliss points out, if it was a international mega-corporation which had stolen your idea, perhaps in another country, where would you find potentially millions of pounds required to launch that prosecution?

His answer, and the suggestion he is taking to UK Business Secretary Lord Mandelson, is simply to make stealing a patent a criminal offence in the same way that it is a criminal offence to steal copyright.

In his letter to Mandelson, Bayliss writes "I believe that UK plc should stand behind those courageous individuals whose ideas can change all our lives both commercially and socially".

Lord Mandelson does not share the Bayliss belief in making intellectual property theft a crime though, and told the Telegraph newspaper that "Issues concerning patents can be highly complex, and so they are best dealt with in civil courts where the appropriate expertise lies and where financial compensation can be claimed".

Maybe it should also be a crime for Microsoft to patent 'Page Up Page Down ' or the process of giving Amazon book reviewers a virtual badge?