Bear with us for a moment for a little background. The Rideau Canal Skateway in Ottawa is the world’s largest natural skating rink, providing nearly 8 km of pristine ice surface during the winter. But maintaining such a large ice surface is a challenge. A regular Zamboni can’t do it; the job is just too big. So the solution is a custom machine called the Froster, conceived by Robert Taillefer and built by Sylvain Fredette.
A patent was filed in 2010, granted by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, and later lost because important notifications started going to an apparently unchecked spam folder. The annual fee went unpaid, numerous emails went unanswered, an expiry date came and went, and that was that.
It’s true that emailed reminders (the agreed-upon — and only — method of contact) going unnoticed to spam was what caused Robert to not take any action until it was too late. We’d all agree that digital assistants in general need to get smarter, and that includes being better at informing the user about automatically-handled things like spam.
But what truly cost Robert Taillefer his patent was having a single point of failure for something very, very important. The lack of any sort of backup method of communication in case of failure or problem meant that this sad experience was, in a way, a disaster just waiting to happen. At least that’s how the Federal Court saw it when he took his complaint to them, and that’s how they continued to see it when he appealed the decision.
If you’ve never heard of the Rideau Canal Skateway or would like to see the Froster in action, check out this short video from the National Capital Commission of Canada, embedded just under the page break.
Its sees a little odd that someone decided it was worth patenting a one-off machine invented specifically for the demands of the world’s-largest-X. How many machines do you hope to sell/collect royalties, to the 2nd-, 3rd-, etc. -largest-X, that you could actually expect to cover the costs of getting and enforcing the patent?
Of course for all I know, loads of smaller ice skating rinks might be happy to upgrade to wider surfacers, even if not the 60-foot width of the original — the patent does (well, did) cover any surfacer with arms extending wider than the vehicle body.
So a longer blade on a lawnmower, a wider deck. crop sprayers with longer booms.
A longer stick on your ceiling fan duster or your grandma’s apple plucker tool.
A larger version of a firetruck. A longer boom on a crane, etc.
So once again, someone simply scaled up an existing tool?
Forgive me, but I’m a bit lost as to what the magical element that was patentable here?
Making that large of an ice resurfacing wand to drag behind the machine is very difficult because of issues with ensuring even pressure and application of ice-water across the width. The devil is in the details.
Let’s waste whatever little freshwater we have on pointless fun. Great idea /s
Nobody is going to miss 4 cubic meters.
Fresh water is a non-renewable resource. Once we exhaust it, it’s game over. Like literaly. It’s not like oil where we can replace it with solar or wind power. If we want Earth to survive beyond 21 century we must act now before it’s too late for the final time.
Human can go on for about 15 days without food, but after 3 days without water a serious dehydration sets in. Two more days and you die of starvation.
Are you of the opinion that rain isn’t fresh water?
Ottawa in winter =/= LA in summer.
Really disappointed that they never tried to send him physical mail. It’s still the standard for a lot of important business correspondence and legal paperwork, and rightly so as it’s harder to ignore. Still, if the guy never registered a physical mailing address then I guess that’s on him?
things like this shouldn’t be patentable in the first place – and even if it was 10 years would be ample..
One of the reasons China has gone from a backwater to the 2nd (or 1st depending how you measure it) largest economy is not having a patent system and not having to take notice of anyone else…
At most, new ideas should only be patentable if they are are significant change from anything done before – and then only for a limited period of time. ie even if someone invented anti gravity tomorrow, they should (at most) get a 10 year patent..
Here, let me fix that second paragraph for you … “One of the reasons China has gone from a backwater to the 2nd (or 1st depending how you measure it) largest economy is by not respecting any concept of individual or collective rights, including intellectual property, personal property or personal freedoms.”
There. All fixed.
Huh? Was there a patent for spraying water over ice?
So now anyone can make a machine to spray water over the zamboni ice court. How shocking.