“America must once again be a country where innovators are rewarded with a green light, not strangled with red tape,” President Donald J. Trump told the Winning the AI Race forum last July. If Trump wants to see strangulation up close, he should visit the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
As if it were run by the Wicked Witch of the West, USPTO subjects pioneering inventors to a parade of unpleasant surprises. So far, no inventors report being chased by evil, flying monkeys. But tomorrow is another day.
If an airborne chimpanzee landed on Gilbert P. Hyatt’s desk and torched his files, Hyatt probably would roll his eyes and ask, “What took you so long?”
USPTO has battled the Sin City-based inventor for nearly 30 years. It has forced him through hoops, entombed him in paperwork, and even issued a jaw-dropping No New Patents for Hyatt order that sounds like hyperbole but is confirmed by federal courtroom testimony.
“The Patent Office is prejudiced against independent inventors and against pioneering inventions,” Hyatt told me over lunch, near the legendary Las Vegas Strip. “They used every trick in the book, to try and get rid of me, to delay, and to hope that I would die and then go away.” Hyatt, 87, has denied USPTO that easy victory. “I’m still here today. My patent applications are still alive.”
USPTO previously treated Hyatt fairly. From 1971 through 1997, it issued him 75 patents. His licensed patents have spawned such products as the first Canon and Nikon digital cameras, Panasonic TV sets, Sharp’s calculators and liquid-crystal displays, and Sony’s PlayStation. Hyatt’s signature achievement is U.S. Patent No. 4,942,516, for the computer microprocessor, which fuels the Digital Age.
Hellbound and Down 