[DMCA-Activists] Walkman Inventor Wins Against Sony, Tires of Patent Fight

[Seth Johnson]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Commons-Law] Inventor of Walkman Gets Dues from SONY
Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2005 12:31:00 +0530
From: Hasit seth <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden

http://www.news.com/
Unlikely trendsetter made earphones a way of life

By Larry Rohter
http://news.com.com/Unlikely+trendsetter+made+earphones+a+way+of+life/2100-1041_3-5999561.html

Story last modified Sat Dec 17 08:18:00 PST 2005

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SÃO PAULO, BRASIL--In the late 1960s, Andreas Pavel and his
friends gathered regularly at his house here to listen to
records, from Bach to Janis Joplin, and talk politics and
philosophy. In their flights of fancy, they wondered why it
should not be possible to take their music with them wherever
they went.

Inspired by those discussions, Pavel invented the device known
today as the Walkman. But it took more than 25 years of battling
the Sony Corporation and others in courts and patent offices
around the world before he finally won the right to say it:
Andreas Pavel invented the portable personal stereo player.

"I filed my first patent a complete innocent, thinking it would
be a simple matter, 12 months or so, to establish my ownership
and begin production," he said at the house where he first
conceived of the device. "I never imagined that it would end up
consuming so much time and taking me away from my real interests
in life."

In person, Pavel seems an unlikely protagonist in such an epic
struggle. He is an intellectual with a gentle, enthusiastic,
earnest demeanor, more interested in ideas and the arts than in
commerce, cosmopolitan by nature and upbringing.

Born in Germany, Pavel came to Brazil at age 6, when his father
was recruited to work for the Matarazzo industrial group, at the
time the most important one here. His mother, Ninca Bordano, an
artist, had a house built for the family with a studio for her
and an open-air salon with high-end audio equipment, meant for
literary and musical gatherings.

Except for a period in the mid-1960s when he studied philosophy
at a German university, Pavel, now 59, spent his childhood and
early adulthood here in South America's largest city, "to my
great advantage," he said. It was a time of creative and
intellectual ferment, culminating in the Tropicalist movement,
and he was delighted to be part of it.

When TV Cultura, a Brazilian station, was licensed to go on the
air, Pavel was hired to be its director of educational
programming. After he was forced to leave because of what he says
was political pressure, he edited a "Great Thinkers" book series
for Brazil's leading publishing house in another effort to
"counterbalance the censorship and lack of information" then
prevailing.

In the end, what drove Pavel back to Europe was his discontent
with the military dictatorship then in power in Brazil. By that
time, though, he had already invented the device he initially
called the stereobelt, which he saw more as a means to "add a
soundtrack to real life" than an item to be mass marketed.

"Oh, it was purely aesthetic," he said when asked his motivation
in creating a portable personal stereo player. "It took years to
discover that I had made a discovery and that I could file a
patent."

Pavel still remembers when and where he was the first time he
tested his invention and which piece of music he chose for his
experiment.

It was February 1972, he was in Switzerland with his girlfriend,
and the cassette they heard playing on their headphones was "Push
Push," a collaboration between the jazz flutist Herbie Mann and
the blues-rock guitarist Duane Allman.

"I was in the woods in St. Moritz, in the mountains," he
recalled. "The snow was falling down. I pressed the button, and
suddenly we were floating. It was an incredible feeling, to
realize that I now had the means to multiply the aesthetic
potential of any situation."

Over the next few years, he took his invention to one audio
company after another--Grundig, Philips, Yamaha and ITT among
them--to see if there was interest in manufacturing his device.
But everywhere he went, he said, he met with rejection or
ridicule.

"They all said they didn't think people would be so crazy as to
run around with headphones, that this is just a gadget, a useless
gadget of a crazy nut," he said.

In New York, where he moved in 1974, and then in Milan, where he
relocated in 1976, "people would look at me sometimes on a bus,
and you could see they were asking themselves, why is this crazy
man running around with headphones?"

Ignoring the doors slammed in his face, Pavel filed a patent in
March 1977 in Milan. Over the next year and a half, he took the
same step in the United States, Germany, England and Japan.

Sony started selling the Walkman in 1979, and in 1980 began
negotiating with Pavel, who was seeking a royalty fee. The
company agreed in 1986 to a limited fee arrangement covering
sales only in Germany, and then for only a few models.

So in 1989 he began new proceedings, this time in British courts,
that dragged on and on, eating up his limited financial
resources.

At one point, Pavel said, he owed his lawyer hundreds of
thousands of dollars and was being followed by private detectives
and countersued by Sony. "They had frozen all my assets, I
couldn't use checks or credit cards," and the outlook for him was
grim.

In 1996, the case was dismissed, leaving Pavel with more than $3
million in court costs to pay.

But he persisted, warning Sony that he would file new suits in
every country where he had patented his invention, and in 2003,
after another round of negotiations, the company agreed to settle
out of court.

Pavel declined to say how much Sony was obliged to pay him,
citing a confidentiality clause. But European press accounts said
avel had received a cash settlement for damages in the low eight
figures and was now also receiving royalties on some Walkman
sales.

These days, Pavel divides his time between Italy and Brazil, and
once again considers himself primarily a philosopher. But he is
also using some of his money to develop an invention he calls a
dreamkit, which he describes as a "hand-held, personal,
multimedia, sense-extension device," and to indulge his
unflagging interest in music.

Recently, he has been promoting the career of Altamiro Carrilho,
a flutist whom he regards as the greatest living Brazilian
musician. He is also financing a project that he describes as the
complete discography of every record ever released in Brazil.

Some of his friends have suggested he might have a case against
the manufacturers of MP3 players, reasoning that those devices
are a direct descendant of the Walkman. Pavel said that while he
saw a kinship, he was not eager to take on another long legal
battle.

"I have known other inventors in similar predicaments and most of
them become that story, which is the most tragic, sad and
melancholic thing that can happen," he said. "Somebody becomes a
lawsuit, he loses all interest in other things and deals only
with the lawsuit. Nobody ever said I was obsessed. I kept my
other interests alive, in philosophy and music and literature."

"I didn't have time to pursue them, but now I have reconquered my
time," he continued. "So, no, I'm not interested anymore in
patents or legal fights or anything like that. I don't want to be
reduced to the label of being the inventor of the Walkman."

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