The following post has been submitted by Doug Marker
Some additional thoughts on the significance of LENR patents.
In the IT industry, there was a period a few years back (a consolidation phase after all the web creativity of the years 1990-2000) where certain companies searched the world for all and any IT related patents they could buy up. This era was known as the ‘patent wars’. The companies included Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Novel Corp, and many others. They then began to use these patents to attack each other.
One famous court battle coming from ‘patent farming’ (very well known in IT circles). was when a company in the US named The SCO Group, claimed it owned the patent rights to the operating system called Unix and then sued IBM for over a billion $s claiming IBM had given parts of Unix (parts IBM had developed) to the Linux project (The Google ‘Android’ OS is a variant of Linux). Apple’s IOS and OS X are Unix variants). The lawsuit was said to have been secretly initiated and funded ‘under the counter’ by Microsoft (see link below).
It lasted for close on 9 years and held the IT industry and Linux back for a while. Microsoft were also fearful of the superior Mac OS & OS X. The belief at the time was that Microsoft desperately needed a pause to redevelop windows and some say the strategy worked for them as they did succeed with their Windows redevelopment efforts, but in the end Linux/Unix could not be stopped and Microsoft began to fade. Linux, Android & Apple’s OSes now dominate the IT world.
The whole thing was industrial warfare at its nastiest. See a sanitised summary here … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO/Linux_controversies
The Microsoft involvement is discussed here … http://techrights.org/2009/08/07/sco-and-anti-linux-microsoft-lawsuits/
In the end SCO lost the war when a court ruled that Novel Corp actually owned the Unix copyright. Then Novel with that ruling secured, donated Unix to the open source world thus ending the attempted sabotage of Linux. So as we see, Linux/Unix and their derivatives are now the most dominant operating systems in the world.
What it seems is happening in LENR land is that Industrial Heat are laying their foundation to dominate the LENR world by locking up all and any LENR based patents they can get control of. They have the war chest (the 89$ million they were supposed to pay to Andrea Rossi).
Also, while there are ‘vested interests’ doing their best to deride LENR (and Andrea Rossi), the buying price for any and all patents remains comparatively low.
The benefit in buying up any and all patents is that when you have enough of them you are in an extraordinarily powerful position to threaten anyone new into the field by claiming they have violated some aspect of one of your massive portfolio of patents.
I fear we are probably in the early phase of such a power grab and IH are the current front runners in the charge.
On the good side, this apparent patent power play tells me LENR has arrived, but on the bad side, it is being fought over in a global battle that may negate the real benefits to the world (climate and the less advantaged peoples of the planet who survive by burning fossil fuels).
This can be seen as our capitalism at it’s ugly worst.
Doug Marker
