More on the Patent Application, prior Invention Disclosure, Licensing Negotiations, and Assignment of "Invention" to the Public Domain

• The following document was sent to me by B Wilson sometime in 1986.  He indicated that it was "merely an informal internal RTI invention disclosure document:"  excerpt 1 (title page) and the list of inventors (p. 49) from the RTI-Invention Disclosure. As in the subsequent patent application, all versions of the IP processor were tested at only low pulse rates ( < 300 pps, and most often at even lower F0 pulse rates!).  Also, as in the patent application, the IP with F0 extraction was the better-perfoming version.  ***Please note which specific processing features B Wilson "lays claim to" in excerpt 2, p. 49 from the RTI Invention Disclosure.   Except for the "all-channels-on" feature (which is hardly-novel!), the specific features that B Wilson "lays claim to" are by-and-large anti-thetical to those features that make the CIS system successful.  Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the specific features B Wilson "lays claim to" are the very same features that he concludes were optimal for the 2 patients tested.

• Many years later when we were discussing the patent application, Charlie Finley told me that B Wilson had been in negotiations with Advanced Bionics for licensing this "invention" (circa '87-'88).  Previously, UCSF (through Bob Schindler's efforts) had made a licensing agreement with Advanced Bionics (I believe the company was called "Mini-Med" at the time).  [As a result of this licensing agreement, a number of my UCSF co-workers and I started receiving significant royalty payments from Advanced Bionics around 1998.  According to one UCSF co-worker, a California newspaper reported that this license agreement is one of the largest revenue-producing agreements held by the University of California System.]  Apparently Advanced Bionics was only willing to offer ~1/10 the level of compensation to the RTI group compared to that in the already-finalized UCSF agreement.  This was unacceptable to B Wilson.  Charlie Finley indicated that there was a desire by some in RTI (individuals in the research-group and/or RTI-management) to put the "invention" in the public domain.  Dewey Lawson also knew of a desire by some in RTI to put the"invention" in the public domain: Document that Released the "Invention" to the Public Domain.  [However, Dewey Lawson had known nothing about the licensing negotiations with Advanced Bionics nor had he known of the existence and filing of the patent application.  In fact he was quite surprised to hear about the patent application when I told him about it many years later.]