Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
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".
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
