Nick Desaulniers: About three years ago this time of the year, my father passed away from a heart attack.
Laura Sydell: Not long ago, I was at a meeting in San Francisco put on by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that's been critical of the patent system. It was an open meeting. And this guy you hear talking, Nick Desaulniers, had decided on the spur of the moment to drop in. And after hearing a couple of other people tell their stories, he got up to tell his.
He's an engineer. And his father's death had spurred him to invent a low-cost heart monitor, which he believed might have saved his dad's life. He developed a prototype in a graduate school class. And he'd started dreaming a bit.
Nick Desaulniers: You know, I got really excited about it. And I was thinking, maybe I can make a business out of this. My grandfather started his own business.
My father made his own business. I need to make my own business someday. So this was something I was really thinking, like, hey, I can make a business out of this.
Laura Sydell: But then he started a patent search to see if anyone else had come up with something resembling his idea already.
Nick Desaulniers: I was horrified at how generic some of the patents were-- "a system for remotely monitoring physiological signals." What the hell does that mean? There are so many ways, so many variables.
How are you getting the data from point A to point B? There are so many ways to do that. And this patent, it covers-- I guess it covers them all.
And seeing some of the numbers that these companies are going back and forth suing each other for, I'm terrified to create a business because of the patent system. I'm horrified. And I'm scared.
And I'm not going to create a business because of it. So however many jobs I could have created or however many lives I could have saved, that's it.
Alex Blumberg: And that is the current state of things. Something as dry as the US patent system can move somebody to tears.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/496/transcript
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Alex Blumberg: Case in point--
Nick Desaulniers: About three years ago this time of the year, my father passed away from a heart attack.
Laura Sydell: Not long ago, I was at a meeting in San Francisco put on by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that's been critical of the patent system. It was an open meeting. And this guy you hear talking, Nick Desaulniers, had decided on the spur of the moment to drop in. And after hearing a couple of other people tell their stories, he got up to tell his.
He's an engineer. And his father's death had spurred him to invent a low-cost heart monitor, which he believed might have saved his dad's life. He developed a prototype in a graduate school class. And he'd started dreaming a bit.
Nick Desaulniers: You know, I got really excited about it. And I was thinking, maybe I can make a business out of this. My grandfather started his own business.
My father made his own business. I need to make my own business someday. So this was something I was really thinking, like, hey, I can make a business out of this.
Laura Sydell: But then he started a patent search to see if anyone else had come up with something resembling his idea already.
Nick Desaulniers: I was horrified at how generic some of the patents were-- "a system for remotely monitoring physiological signals." What the hell does that mean? There are so many ways, so many variables.
How are you getting the data from point A to point B? There are so many ways to do that. And this patent, it covers-- I guess it covers them all.
And seeing some of the numbers that these companies are going back and forth suing each other for, I'm terrified to create a business because of the patent system. I'm horrified. And I'm scared.
And I'm not going to create a business because of it. So however many jobs I could have created or however many lives I could have saved, that's it.
Alex Blumberg: And that is the current state of things. Something as dry as the US patent system can move somebody to tears.
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