Some positive news!
- Thread starter Kerbe
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I googled Zaptera and found a 2013 Autoblog article that described the original split between Zaptera and Aptera:
After years of struggles and a bankruptcy in 2011, the Aptera assets were revived last year by a Chinese company, Zap Jonway. Zaptera USA, which now owns the Aptera Motors assets, has announced that Aptera will be split into two companies.
One, Zaptera, will stay at it is, and “will retain the same Owners, Board Directors and Officers,” according to a press release emailed to us. Zaptera will focus on China and will mass-produce an all-electric Aptera 2e at a manufacturing facility owned by the Jonway Group.
The other company, Aptera USA, is splitting off to become independent. It will be run by CEO Richard Deringer, who told Gizmag in no uncertain terms that Zap Jonway is not in the picture. “We have nothing to do with Zap Jonway. We wish them well in trying to survive, but we don’t want any association with them,” he said.
Perhaps Mr. Deringer didn't hire the best lawyers. Thirteen years later, the sticky split appears to finally be a done deal.
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Kerbe
Well-Known Member
Zaptera suddenly reappeared and started this now-terminated lawsuit when Anthony and Fambro reacquired their original Aptera intellectual property rights in 2019. Deringer's "Aptera USA" existed from 2012 until 2014.
We don't know the exact details of the IP that Aptera acquired from Zaptera, but it appears that Zaptera's case was weak. However, it also appears that Aptera decided that it was not worth spending years fighting them in court, so it was better to throw them some bones so they would go away. For a startup to survive, it has to be laser focused, and make strategic decisions about where to focus its limited resources. If Aptera succeeds as a company, Zaptera wins with its stock, but the important thing is that Aptera can stop paying its lawyers and focus on getting to production.
/rant/
I think that "intellectual property" is generally bad for society. Patents generally stifle rather than stimulate innovation, so the world would be better off without them or at least make them hard to get and grant very few of them. In my opinion, all software and genetics patents should be abolished. I also believe that copyrights should be shortened to 25 years, with the right to ask for a 25 year extension, but copyright holders who are granted a 25 year extension have to file an address in a public database. If someone sends certified mail to the filed address asking for permission to use the copyrighted work and doesn't get a response within a year, then permission is automatically granted. The only part of current IP law that makes sense in my opinion is trademark law.
/rant/
/rant/
I think that "intellectual property" is generally bad for society. Patents generally stifle rather than stimulate innovation, so the world would be better off without them or at least make them hard to get and grant very few of them. In my opinion, all software and genetics patents should be abolished. I also believe that copyrights should be shortened to 25 years, with the right to ask for a 25 year extension, but copyright holders who are granted a 25 year extension have to file an address in a public database. If someone sends certified mail to the filed address asking for permission to use the copyrighted work and doesn't get a response within a year, then permission is automatically granted. The only part of current IP law that makes sense in my opinion is trademark law.
/rant/
So, you're ok with a company investing billions into something and needing to charge $500 each to recoup those costs only for a copy to reverse engineer it for $8 in offshore labor and sell it for $5?
If you do that, no one will ever invest to build new things because it's pissing money away into the wind. i think the outcome is the exact opposite of what you mention above. Lack of protection will stifle innovation.
People don't build stuff because they are good people.
They build stuff to make money.
We do not live in a utopian society.
I do believe in open sourcing things, etc. Selling support, install, etc on the product instead of the product itself for example as a money maker. But that needs to be a viable model for the product. There is no support enhancement for drugs like there is for software.
If you do that, no one will ever invest to build new things because it's pissing money away into the wind. i think the outcome is the exact opposite of what you mention above. Lack of protection will stifle innovation.
People don't build stuff because they are good people.
They build stuff to make money.
We do not live in a utopian society.
I do believe in open sourcing things, etc. Selling support, install, etc on the product instead of the product itself for example as a money maker. But that needs to be a viable model for the product. There is no support enhancement for drugs like there is for software.
From the perspective of U.S. law, the original purpose of the patent system, as stated in article 1, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, is not to compensate the inventor, but to advance science and the useful arts:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
The patent system as it operates today is doing the opposite, by hindering "the Progress of Science and useful Arts". The original idea was that inventors would stop keeping their inventions secret, but instead publish them as patents that anyone could read, but in return they would be granted an exclusive monopoly of 14 years to use the patent. In other words, a temporary monopoly was granted in return for sharing a useful idea with the public.
The original purpose of patents has been perverted. Today, lawyers instruct engineers to not read patents, because if they have knowledge that a patent exists, then they will have to pay a lot more in a patent suit than if they unknowingly violated a patent. Patents today are not written for the people implementing useful ideas, but for lawyers, and they are not designed to share knowledge, but to hide the implementation details as much as possible from rivals.
I can say as computer programmer, that it is virtually impossible to create any useful piece of software without violating dozens of patents. If you create an operating system, you are going to violate thousands of patents. For example, a linked list is one of the most basic data structures and the most popular sorting algorithm is Quicksort, but if you use Quicksort to sort data in a linked list, you have violated a patent, and there are literally thousands of idiotic patents like that. There is a patent if you invert the bits in an image to show a mouse pointer. Amazon got a patent for being able to purchase something online with one click. All of Amazon's competitors had to implement two clicks just to avoid Amazon's ridiculous patent.
Patents have become a way for large corporations to crush any new competitors in the market. For example, if you are a startup that has an innovative idea, you can patent your idea, but in trying to implement your new idea, you are going to violate dozens of patents from the incumbents, because patents have been granted for everything. Then, the incumbents appear with their lawyers, and each new patent suit costs a minimum of half a million dollars to fight, and unlike the startup, the incumbents can spend years fighting in court, so the startups can't compete. In contrast, the patent violation suits between the incumbents result in cross-licensing there patents, because you literally can't produce a useful product without violating all sorts of patents.
Companies spend millions acquiring patents as a defensive measure, so they will have many ways to countersue if they get attacked with patent suits, so the patent system basically becomes a useless tax on doing business that ends up making everything more expensive.
The argument that patents are needed to stimulate R&D simply isn't based on empirical evidence. Microsoft didn't bother filing for hardly any patents before 1990, and it managed to create MS BASIC, MS-DOS, Windows, MS Office, etc. without any patents, which shows that the software industry certainly didn't need patents to develop. Only when it started getting attacked by patent trolls, did Microsoft start filing for patents, and since then it has used them to stifle and/or tax its competitors, which did nothing to promote innovation.
Arguably the most innovative aerospace company in the world today is SpaceX, which doesn't bother filing for patents. The most innovative Western auto company has been Tesla, which only files its patents for defensive purposes, and says that it won't use its patents against a competitor who doesn't attack Tesla. By the way, Tesla has a market cap worth more than the rest of the auto industry, despite not using its patents. The reality is that it is very easy to have an idea, but the hard part is actually implementing that idea, as any engineer will tell you. The fact that SpaceX still doesn't have a real competitor a decade after inventing reusable rockets drives home that point.
Most of the groundbreaking research is government financed anyway. If you look at the American drug industry, nearly every new drug was developed with government money, often in universities, but then the patent was bought by private pharmaceutical companies which use the patent to keep out any competitors making generics for the next 20 years, which raises the price for all Americans. If you look at eUV lithography, AI, 5G or any of the great innovations in the last decade, the R&D would have been happened with or without patents, but the end result is that a few companies end up locking out the competition after the innovation is created. ASML has a monopoly on eUV due to patents, so it can raise the prices of advanced lithography equipment for the entire world.
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