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REEBUTTAL The other day we received a guest opinion on the validity of the CBTF patent (CBTF Patent: Bogus?). Nothing better than a guest rebuttal, so here it is. Enjoy The patent process and patent law is not always understood by those who have not gone through it themselves. Having gone through the patent process several times in the past decade or so, I have learned a few things about patents and the process that one has to go through to get one. But more importantly, it is now clear to me that the reasons for getting a patent today are not the same as they were 20 years ago and, in my opinion, are not what the patent office had in mind. Today, companies apply for and hold onto patents mainly to ensure that they will be able to use the technology themselves. They very rarely have any intention of licensing out their technology or suing anyone else who might choose to use the technology. Instead they are protecting themselves from allowing someone else from patenting the same idea and therefore preventing them from using it. The company I work for is in the business of building jet engines. We hold numerous patents on various pieces of technology that go into our engines. It is very likely that other jet engine manufacturers out there are using technologies that infringe on our patents. But we are not in the business of suing these other companies for infringing on our patent. Instead, we are in the business of making jet engines. We do not want to be prevented from using any of these technologies, so we patent them. That way, we can be assured that no one else will be able to claim that they own those technologies and therefore sue us. This is a major paradigm shift in the intellectual property field that has occurred over the last decade or two. In my opinion, it is not in keeping with the original intention of the patent and copyright law. But be that as it may, it is the current state of affairs in industry today. This is the main reason why you are seeing a lot of very narrow patents covering very specific, albeit clever, inventions these days. It is easy enough to steal intellectual property these days and corporate espionage is a big problem for a lot of companies. As far as the CBTF patent itself, I have not read the text of this patent, so I am not sure what their claims are. As far as I can tell, you have not read the patent text either. I do not think that it is fair to judge the legitimacy of a patent without first reading the text of the patent. It is not a fair assessment of a patent to say "well, I saw something sorta like that before". Neither of us really knows for sure what they are claiming is their patent-able idea. As you say, specific inventions that are already in the public domain are not patent-able. However it is possible to incorporate prior art technologies into a patent-able technology. For example, a recent patent that I reviewed was for a roller-burnishing tool. This technology uses a wheel that rolls over the surface of the object to be burnished and applies a load at the surface that imparts the burnishing compressive stresses into the material. Now you obviously cannot patent the wheel (prior art), but you can patent a technology that has a wheel in it. The main claim of this patent was the wheel that was used to impart a uniform and well-understood load into the part. So just because a well-understood prior art technology is used (in this case, the wheel) does not necessarily mean that the technology cannot be patented. As you say, canting keels have been around for some time, and twin (for & aft) rudders have also been used before. But just because those prior art technologies have been used before, does not mean that they cannot be put together into some new way that produces a fundamentally different and patent-able product. I am not familiar with the Red Witch, but it would not surprise me if it had many of the same parts at the CBTF boats. However, it is not necessarily the parts, but how you put them together that is the patent-able technology. I would be very surprised if the Red Witch had all of the same elements as the Dyna Yacht boats used in the same functional ways (although it is ironic that Dyna Yacht's proof of concept boat was named Red Hornet which is a very similar name to Red Witch) . It seems to me that the incorporation of the collective control system is probably the most novel aspect of the CBTF technology. This is a completely different idea that focal steering systems incorporated on catamarans (and cars). It bears some resemblance to a "gybing board" in that the forward foil does take on an angle relative to the boat that is favorable for a given tack. But an actively controlled angle of the forward foil is fundamentally different from the passiveness of a gybing board. and the fact that the forward foil behaves as a steerable control surface makes it different from a centerboard altogether. I would be surprised if the CBTF patent did not rely heavily on the redistribution of functions (righting, lateral lift, steering) of the three appendages. It may have been fairly easy to prove that although many of these appendages have appeared in prior art, their functions were different enough from the CBTF embodiment of those same appendages to make the CBTF technology patent-able. Having been through the rigor of a patent application process myself, there is a lot of research that must go on to search the prior art and to prove to the patent examiner that your technology is fundamentally different. Having said that, the prior art must be searchable meaning that someone must have written something down about the prior art invention that can be found through standard search techniques. If the guy who built the Red Witch really did have the first CBTF boat, but never published any research on it or applied for a patent himself, then it would have been next to impossible for even an expert in the field of yachting to find a reference to it. The existence of such a craft may or may not invalidate the patent, but it would be up to the inventor of the prior art boat to prove his claim that he had done it first. If this person is still alive and involved in sailing, he has probably heard about the CBTF technology. It seems to me that this inventor would have stepped forward if he truly believed that he had a claim to this technology. I have had a few exchanges with Dyna Yacht in the past and have found them to be very responsive. I suggest that you contact them and ask them about their patents. They may even send you a copy of the patent itself (so that you will not have to spend the $5.00 it takes to get a copy through your local public library). You can also discuss these prior art inventions with them and I'm sure they will be able to help you understand how their technology is different and unique. Will
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