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Pre-plagiarizing

L

Lars Hansen

Joined
May 8, 2019
Messages
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Location
Funen, Denmark
One of the joys of joining a serious forum is the acces to all the old threads on every topic imaginable - and a few more!
It's a true treasure grove with both old and new ideas from a lot of experienced turners.

That said, I must admit that I was very disappointed to find a sample of
"pre-plagiarizing"! Never heard that term before?
I'll explain!

Some months ago, I made a few mockups for a sharpening jig for skews. Not being very inventive, I looked to the only part of the Sorby ProEdge system that I like and tried adapting it to my Oneway platform.
The model ended up looking like this.
1.JPG
A few distracting health issues since then have kept me from having a prototype made in metal.
Well, time away from the workshop is potential research time, so I dug into old sharpening threads and what do I see: A highly respected turner, mr. Lucas, not only snatched my idea-to-be, but he made it public a decade before I got around to it. BAD! :D

Lars
(Yet another sharpening nerd)
 
Lars,

Having been involved with new product development, patents, and property rights for many years, I understand your frustration. Publicly sharing your ideas (trade-shows, demos, Internet forums, etc.) almost make any idea “public information”. There is also the issue of timing. 10 years is a long time to have an idea out in a public forum. There is an expectation by the courts that a person should act to protect their ideas once they are made public. If you don’t do something (patent, commercialize your idea, or license it to someone else) an opposing party can argue you that you abandoned your idea, and it becomes “public information”. It may not seem right or just, but it is the way the world works.

I am not an attorney, just a small businessman who has wrestled with lawyers over these issues many times.

Jon
 
Lars My jig was out of necessity. Never have made one out of metal. In fact I sharpen my skews by hand now on a Robo Rest. I like the term Pre-plagerizing. My hope is that you update it and make it better. did you see the one I made for oval skews. It was similar but i cupped the area where the skew rests to the same shape as my oval skew. That kept it sitting flat so it didn't rock. I must have been heavy handed back then. Now I find that if you have a gentle touch when you first put the bevel to the stone you can easily detect the correct angle and then just grind it so I don't use either jig anymore. Well I take that back. They are handy when a new turner comes over with a badly ground skew. It is much easier to correct the grind using one of the jigs. I never liked the Oneway jig. My early jig required milling a slot in the Wolverine tool rest, which is still the best way. I found out after I built that one that all that was necessary was to put a plate on the front of the jig that rides against the front of the oneway tool rest. Much easier to build and you don't have to modify the tool rest.
 
With my robo rest, I was asked why I didn't patent it. Part of the reason was cost, and the other part was because every thing I based it off of was older than dirt..... You never know..... Kind of like one of the guitar companies that made the neck with frets that fanned rather than ran straight across the neck. They were able to patent it, even though there are examples going back into the 1600's or so....

robo hippy
 
I had absolutely no plans of claiming that my idea was an original product or even worth producing.
In the winter season I teach a dozen beginners, and I plan to offer them a *very* easy approach to sharpening or rather refreshing tools.
Hence the idea of borrowing the slider concept from Sorby and making my own hybrid - only to find out now that JL. had similar ideas ten years earlier. So yes, Don, this was my quirky way of paying my respects to JL as the original inventor.
I'm still gonna make my own, though...
Lars
PS: Have a Robo Rest, love it!
 
Learned this in graduate school- Using one source is plagiarism. Using several sources is research.
 
See, I told you that investing in that TARDIS had all sorts of benefits. Or was it that I will eventually tell you?
 
This sounds like an idea for an invention that somebody at work proposed in a meeting. The invention was to be known as a "regressive regretter" and would be a device that sat in the middle of a conference table and would light up just before somebody was about to say something that they would later regret saying. There was even a mock-up placed on a conference table that would light up every time a sound was detected. The idea never made it any further than that when everybody realized it was always better to have a scapegoat than mutually shared blame. :D
 
... and whoever is to blame doesn’t work here any more...
 
John Torchick said:
Learned this in graduate school- Using one source is plagiarism. Using several sources is research.
Click to expand...

John, is that sort of like the difference between a lie, a damn lie and a statistic? :-D
 
Mark, I heard: Figures never lie but liars always figure. Your post depends on whether you fish or not.
Statistics- A man had an income of one million dollars and lived on an estate of one city block. His chauffeur made fifty thousand a year. The average income of that block was $550,000, which tells nothing about either person.
 
John Torchick said:
The average income of that block was $550,000, which tells nothing about either perso
Click to expand...

:) Sorry but numbers jump off the page at me :-)
1,050,000/2= 525,000
:) Now what does that say about us. :)

I worked as an applied mathematician - my job was getting the wrong answers fast, but knowing how wrong was important.

I’d be happy if I got as close as $550k most days especially if I bounded it +- 30k
 
Last edited:
Majors were B. S., biology and M. Div. philosophy/theology. Math was the only thing that kept me from majoring in mechanical engineering.
 
John Torchick said:
The average income of that block was $550,000
Click to expand...

This says that there is another person living on the estate who is making $615,000 or possibly many other people not mentioned. Ignore the mathematician, what you need is a creative accountant.
 
hockenbery said:
Hmm! :)
(1,000,000+50,000+600,000)/3 = 550,000
Click to expand...

Dyslexia here ... I misread what John posted as $555,000 instead of what he wrote ($550,000). Maybe I pre-plagerized what he intended to write. And, why was he trying to hide the third person anyway?
 
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