Worrying about Patents and copyrighted material

[ThermalRunaway]

Hello everyone,

To start I'll just quickly introduce myself because I'm new here. My name's Brian Hoskins, I'm 25 and I'm an Electronics Technician which I've been for 7 years (basically since I left school). I have an interest in Electronics Design at the hobbyist level and often design my own projects for use around the home. I've studied Electronics at various levels and have many qualifications within the electronics field, most of which are digital electronics biased mainly because that's where my main interest lies.

I'm currently in the middle of designing my biggest project yet which, although is mainly for my own personal satisfaction and my own education, I'm trying to design it as if I were a real Electronics engineer working on a real project for a real company - which means I'm doing all the research into Electrical safety, patents, copyright, market issues (who are the market competitors, is the project viable, can it command a market share, can it make money etc etc) and I'm also making sure to properly document all of my research and produce reports on all the relevant issues that I've mentioned above. Normally I would skip all of this boring hassle and just get on with the project, but I'm hoping that the end result in this case will be an extremely polished product with all the proper research and documentation to go with it. Part of the reason I'm doing it is as a personal education project but mainly I thought it'd be great to do a couple of good projects in this manner so that I can take the finished products along to future job interviews so that I can sell myself better - "These are my qualifications, this is what I can do and these are real project prototypes that I've designed and built myself", for example.

Now, part of the research I'm doing is on patents. My project requires some form of wireless communication system in order to send simple commands to a remote device somewhere in the home, and having done some research in this area I quite liked how the X10-protocol worked and felt it would be the ideal solution for my project. The X-10 protocol allows you to transmit and receive simple commands over the domestic mains supply in order to control other devices (switch things on and off etc).

My original idea was to implement this X-10 protocol in my own project and use the command-set for the protocol to suit my own needs, but I became worried that if I did this I would be breaking copyright laws or patents. Obviously this isn't a problem for a home project that I'm only going to use for myself, but as I mentioned earlier I'm trying to design this project as if it were a commercial project that would be manufactured and sold for profit. With this in mind I visited the UK patents office website to see if I could find out which parts of the X-10 protocol, if any, were protected by patents. I proposed to then modify the X-10 protocol such that my version of it no longer broke those patents. Obviously this would mean that my project wouldn't have X-10 compatability, but that isn't an issue for my particular project anyway.

Unfortunately in order to obtain the required information you need to ask the patents office to do a search, and for this luxury they charge you £2500, which obviously is way over the budget of a home hobbyist who only wants to do some research for his own needs!

Since then I have completely modified the entire X-10 protocol so that it works on the same principal but uses a competely different command structure which I've designed specifically to suit my own project and obviously the transmissions will now be completely incompatible with X-10 devices.

My worry is whether this is enough in order to avoid copyright or patent-breaking issues? Are there any Electronics Engineers on this forum who have experience in avoiding patent or copyright issues and do you have any advice to offer me? Do you think I could actually contact the X-10 company themselves and ask them the question directly?

Any advice or web links to information on patents and how they could effect projects like these would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks everyone

Brian

 

[tansis]

If the project is as you say for your own personal use without the desire to make a profit from your venture , then it matters not what protocol one uses, modified or otherwise. In order to produce a "polished product" it would have to offer more than the X10 system.

Few here would lay claim to having 256 electrical switches, but being able to email or text a command to a VCR for instance could come in handy.

 

[ThermalRunaway]

My particular project does not require a complex wireless control system, it only requires the ability to send and receive simple commands. The command-set I designed for my project only makes up 8 commands in total so we're only talking about using a 3-bit command code. My project isn't a complete home wireless control system, it simply uses a wireless control system as part of the project.

With that in mind, an X-10 like system is more than adequate for my needs.

When I said that I wanted to produce a polished product, I meant that I wanted to make sure I'd explored all avenues just as if it were a real product. Since in the real world you would need to worry about breaking other people's patents, I'm also researching in this area and that's why I'm asking the question. As you correctly point out, patents and copyrights have no real bearing on home hobbyist projects but as an educational thing I'm trying to do everything by the book on this one.

Thanks for the reply

Brian

 

[Dialtone]

You can get some good patent related info by using the online search capabilities of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)
Do a Google search for the link. I would caution you to be patient, as the site can bog down at times due to high demand. I would suggest you try your searches during non US business hours and weekends.

I would not let it bother me that the site is US based, as most patents are recognized in many countries by both treaty and international law.
You may even be able to find samples of patents that use X-10 in some way and see what parts of them were patented seperately.

In your case, I would search for both X-10 related patents and power line transmission related patents. Since you have a unique protocol for your product, I would not think the protocol would produce an X-10 infringement, but if the power line transmission part of patent is still valid, you may have a problem in that area.

In addition to all of the above, I never saw any requirements that restricted any non-US citizen from submitting a patent to the USPTO for consideration.

Dialtone

 

[ThermalRunaway]

I think X-10 was developed by American designers anyway. X-10 never made it big here in the UK because the company never bothered to get it CE certified which means that you're not really supposed to sell X-10 devices in European countries (as far as I understand)

Thanks very much for the help, I'll definately give that a go.

Brian

 

[tansis]

Part of the problem as I recall was that certain freaquencies on domestic mains supply lines were reserved for industrial use for prpoposed communitaion of a the power company with the domestic supply meter with a view towards remote reading of the consumers meter and the possability of implementing a termination of service if desired.

 

[ThermalRunaway]

Yes that is indeed a problem. Some of the power companies were on about providing internet access over the mains supply as well weren't they, although I haven't heard of this actually being done yet...

Lots of things to think about!

Brian

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

I think X-10 was developed by American designers anyway. X-10 never made it big here in the UK because the company never bothered to get it CE certified which means that you're not really supposed to sell X-10 devices in European countries (as far as I understand)

CE certification is a rather strange thing, you don't 'get it certified', it's 'self certified' - almost everthing you see with a CE sticker hasn't actually been 'certified' at all, it's just had a sticker applied. Certainly any of the cheap Chinese manufacturers will apply a CE sticker to your product on request, simply for the price of the stickers.

The actual X10 idea wasn't original by any means, it's been done for many, many, years before X10 was released - so the only patents/copyright X10 could have is in their actual command structure.

 

[ThermalRunaway]

I understand that communication over the mains supply is nothing new and I was hoping it would be the case that only the protocol itself would be patented. Since I have no need for compatability with X-10 products with my project (infact it's desirable NOT to have compatability) I'm probably ok with what I've alerady done then - I've completely re-designed the protocol to suit my own needs so that it doesn't even resemble the X-10 command structure anymore.

Be nice if I could get some printed research from the patent office or something confirming this is the case, but I'll settle for being more sure that I'm right.

Thanks guys

Brian