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Phonics vs Whole Language
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Why a Patent? What Rights do Shareware Users Have?
I have applied for a patent on the Right Time Reader method.
Under present laws, all material at this site is protected by copyright, but an idea or a method cannot be so protected. However, when the patent is granted, nobody will have the right to use this method without my permission. Obtaining a patent is expensive and difficult, and it sounds somehow selfish. So why have I done this, and what does it mean to you?
UPDATE: After a couple of go-rounds with the Patent Office it looks like no patent will be issued, so I'm going over the site to expunge any remaining "Patent Pending" notices. I don't have the resources to pursue the matter farther, and it seems that some bits of any patentable implementation I can think of have already been patented by people who had various computerized books and reading tutors in mind, leaving open too narrow a slice of the potentially patentable landscape to be worthwhile.
This is good news and bad news. Since the idea itself isn't patentable, and the computerized or mechanized methods of applying it are already pretty well covered, the nightmare Disney scenario looks unlikely. If the idea should catch on, and Disney or a similar corporate behemoth wanted to patent it, they would have to buy licenses from several holders of similar-but-actually-different patents whose intellectual property rights would otherwise make it worthwhile for them to sue. But those patents are already aging, and there's no groundswell happening here that a Disney is going to notice.
I'll leave the rest of this page up for awhile just as background.
Why?
My highest priority is to see this method used universally, since I think it will drastically improve education and the quality of people's lives. Those who would have learned well anyway, will learn better. Those who would have had trouble throughout their school careers and afterwards, due to difficulty with reading, may be spared that fate and be able to lead happier and more productive lives. With apologies for sounding grandiose, I even believe that it will improve our democracy, which depends on a well informed electorate. Many peple who are not technically illiterate simply do not read much because it is hard work for them. I say it should be fun and easy.
If young people no longer need to wait until school entry to learn to read, they will learn more before school entry, and they will demand real education from their first year in school, instead of just starting to acquire the tool of literacy, years too late.
However, I do not want any one commercial entity to control this method. If a major publisher or entertainment company were to patent this method, they could dominate the marketplace for a generation to come, or even longer.
If you have read the explanation of the mechanics of using Right Time Reader, you will know that
a great deal of repetition is involved
. Imagine that one company controlled the method, and produced the only materials available. Infants and their parents would be exposed many, many, many times to one particular style of artwork, and one particular version of children's stories, and the particular brand-name products that might be placed in these stories and pictures.
The potential goes beyond brainwashing
, because the infants have no previous memories to be erased. Their preferences would be formed from the start in the way that the publisher chose. For their whole lives, they might prefer certain products or a certain art style, and their attitudes might be shaped by the content of the stories that the single publisher chose to sell. Such market dominance could easily extend to the next generation, beyond the twenty year life of a patent, as the infants so trained selected similar materials from the same company for their own babies' training.
This is too much power for any one entity to possess. Once it is patented, I will never grant an exclusive license for the use of this method. I want numerous publishers, and numerous individuals, to be able to produce the materials that train babies to read, so that diversity is maintained and there is competition in the marketplace of ideas.
I want all parents to be able to produce their own training materials, as they can from the downloads available here. I will never charge a compulsory license fee for any individual who wants to produce training materials for in-family, non-commercial use. That capability remains available to all as shareware.
In the case of individual use, I reserve the right to intervene (using my rights as patent owner) only if the method is used in an infamous way, such as the production of hate-oriented material or blatant pornography, that could bring disrepute on the method or that might in my opinion harm the infant. As owner of the patent, I will have the advantage here of being able to apply my own standards, rather than depending on the fickle moods of politics or the courts. Those who would misuse this method beware - I will use every means possible to make you pay a high price for violating the shareware agreement, or the eventual patent.
So you see why it was important to me to patent this method to keep it out of the wrong hands. Even if my patent application is denied, the money and time that I have spent on it will not have been wasted. I believe that I wrote the application sufficiently well that nobody else will ever be able to patent this method, since it has been thoroughly disclosed and discussed in the application, which is published as a normal part of the application process. Nobody else will be able to claim it as their invention, and if it is not patentable for me, it should not be patentable for anyone, and will simply be in the public domain.
Besides that protective function of the patent application, I would really like to make some money from this discovery, and there is almost no way for me to do that except by licensing rights to publishers. Shareware contributions will be greatly appreciated, but are notoriously slow to arrive, and usually small in aggregate dollars. I and my small team can use some money, and I think we deserve it. I have put in three years of full time university study, done a great deal of development work, and expensively applied for a patent, and I would like to see some material rewards as well as the less tangible satisfactions.
Please make a shareware contribution if you like the program and benefit from it.
If you find this program and this method useful, shareware contributions will be cheerfully (or even gleefully!)  accepted - and all you have to do is go to the homepage and use the Paypal button. It really works!!
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The current URL is http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~parsonst/index.html
This file was last modified 19-January-2003
To get in touch, email me:
 parsonst@ihug.co.nz
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