9,100: the number of patents earned by IBM inventors last year. It’s a new milestone marking IBM’s 26th consecutive year of U.S. patent leadership. In 2018, IBM led the industry in patent grants related to a number of technologies, including 2,000 for cloud computing, 1,600 for AI, and 1,400 for security. It’s a testament to the savvy and sagacity of our invention team—8,500 IBM inventors across 47 U.S. States and 48 countries—and we’d like to thank each and every one of them for their dedication to the behind-the-scenes exploration of tomorrow’s technology.
On this date in 1973, IBM introduced the universal product code, or UPC. Along with the introduction of laser scanning technology, the UPC barcode quickly revolutionized the grocery and retail industries, making checkout faster and inventory tracking a lot easier. The barcode changed the information processing system for almost every industry around the world and remains one of the most pervasive inventory tracking tools in the world today. Though just a small group of black bars, the UPC changed the world in a very big way.
“I realized that I am super annoyed, and have been for a long time, with this idea that Bill Gates is some kind of ‘decent human being’ for so-called, ‘giving away’ his fortune. Because that is not what this man does, and a good human being is not what this man is. Bill Gates is a fucking monster. And so I just want to kind of explain why I have so many negative feelings towards Bill Gates.
With everything that’s going on right now with the vaccines, and the fact that most of the world can’t get them, can be traced directly back to that one man. Because back in 2020 when this all started, the world was cooperating. And I think we all remember this. The world was cooperating to study the virus. And scientists all over the world were sharing their findings to discover how the virus works, and they were developing methods for treatment and they were also developing these vaccines at an incredible speed. And they were doing this together in the spring of 2020.
And so by the end of the spring of 2020, the World Health Organization had created a global knowledge base, so that the vaccination effort could be a team effort instead of a competitive race. And their global knowledge base was called C-TAP (COVID-19 Technology Access Pool). And that’s when Bill Gates stepped in, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. What they did is, they created a separate process for managing the world’s COVID response. They called it the ACT-Accelerator (Access to COVID-19 Tools), which is a public-private partnership that included patent protections, so that the companies that figured out the tasks, treatments and vaccines, would be able to keep their discoveries to themselves, prevent other companies from copying them, and profit on vaccines as they sell them around the world. That was the goal of the ACT-Accelerator. It was a competition to the team building approach. So instead of cooperation, Gates sets up this separate thing for corporate competition, with the winners being rewarded with monopoly powers over our vaccines.
And so instead of the technology being figured out and distributed around the world, Gates’ brainchild organization instead created something called COVAX, which buys vaccines from the companies with the monopoly powers over the vaccines. And then they pass out some vaccines to poor countries around the world like a fucking cherry. But even the stated goal of COVAX has always been a weak one. They never intended to distribute more than enough vaccines to vaccinate any more than 20 percent of the populations of low and middle income countries. And they have totally failed to do even that. The vast majority of the vaccines would have to be fought for in the private market by the governments. And at the beginning of April 2021, 130 countries, home to over 2.5 billion people, hadn’t given out a single dose of a vaccine to anyone in their countries.
So, as a human race, I know that here in the United States all of us are able to get the vaccine. Like, great for us, right? But we are not the only humans here that are dealing with the virus. And as humans, we don’t have enough supply because only a handful of companies can [afford to] make the damn things. And Bill Gates is personally responsible for stopping other companies from having access to vaccine instruction manuals. Because that’s what they need. In fact, when the director at Oxford—which is where the science behind the AstraZeneca vaccine was figured out—when Oxford wanted to publish the instruction manual for their vaccine to the public domain for the world to use, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation used their power to pressure Oxford to instead sign an exclusive contract with AstraZeneca, which now has monopoly rights to that vaccine.
Bill Gates and those who are like him are designing global policy on vaccines, so that the private market decides who gets them. And that’s even when the institutions like the World Health Organization, that are generally on board as the administrators of the global economic system based on privatization of everything—even when those institutions are saying, “This is a global pandemic, and this is a time when we as humans should be making an exception to these rules, we should be sharing the technology to end this pandemic instead of putting patents and profits first.”—even when those institutions are saying that, Bill Gates has enough power as one man, to stop the world from doing it. This economic system has created oligarchs that are so rich and so powerful they can shape the fate of the entire world. And the way that that’s possible? Well, Bill Gates, as the founder of Microsoft, he fought politically to protect monopoly patents. This is something he has been a zealot about for the entire time he’s been in the public eye. He used his own patent protections over computer knowledge to become super rich when Microsoft had monopoly powers over their technologies. And then Bill Gates used his wealth to legally bribe politicians with campaign contributions, who then passed laws that created and continually expanded an economic system that funnels the world’s wealth to the richest people on earth. An economic system that funnels the world’s wealth TO HIM. He had so much damn money, thanks to this system, he got to like $150 billion dollars or so. He started a foundation that would spend his money on the things that HE wanted to spend it on. Billions of dollars. And people think that the sun shines out of his ass for this. Like, he’s some kind of noble human being, giving away his savings. But that’s not what this is. When you’re giving out money by the tens of billions, that’s government—just privatized. That’s society altering money. And the way Gates does it? He’s not funding food banks around the world. He’s chosen to use his billions to shape global health policy in a way that protects PATENTS. This insane economic system lets one dude control $150 billion dollars, and has created a situation where so much of our global health research is funded through him, that any organization or individual in the field that dares to challenge the Gates Foundation on drug monopolies will find themselves iced out of funding. And so everybody’s falling in line.
Right now he’s basically using his fortune to act as a volunteer lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, and he’s been doing this since 1999. He’s using his personal billions—wealth beyond what many governments have—to protect the profits of multinational drug companies, while being branded a hero for donating some drugs to poor countries, to charity wash the entire racket: “Oh he’s giving away all his money! He’s giving away 95 percent of his wealth” … at $150 billion dollars, if he gives away 95 percent of it, he’s still keeping over $7 billion dollars for himself. This guy is a selfish mother fucker. It’s NOT charity. It’s not charity what he’s doing. He’s shaping global policy. He’s governing on his own. His fortune, via the Gates Foundation, stopped the world from sharing information about AIDS treatments two decades ago. And now he’s pulling the same shit with the COVID technologies.
Now this dynamic is being challenged in the World Trade Organization—as it should be—where more than 100 countries, more than half the world is trying to force companies like Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, and Moderna, to give them the instructions so that they can make their own vaccines and get this pandemic over with. And Moderna is a perfect example of the privatization of government funded science. Because the mRNA technology that is central to the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines? That’s been in development since 2016. It’s not new, even though we’re acting like this was invented in the last year. It’s not. They’ve been working on it for years. But it’s an invention of the National Institute of Health, which is otherwise known as OUR GOVERNMENT. So allowing obscene prices and profits for pharmaceutical companies, that did not lead to the research and development that created that amazing technology. It was our tax money that did it. It was our government that did it. We should all be patting ourselves on the back for that because we are the ones who funded it. It wasn’t Moderna, and it wasn’t Pfizer. It was us. The government scientists were working on a vaccine with Moderna for a different Coronavirus, MERS, when they got the information about the COVID virus. And so they were able to quickly tweak the technology they were already working on for 5 years. They gave the instructions for those tweaks to Moderna, and then Moderna did the work of cooking the recipe. But the mRNA technology? THAT’S OURS.
And on top of that, I’ve read every COVID related law, from start to finish. Every word. And starting in early March, 2020, our congress poured billions and billions of our tax money into vaccines. We paid for the raw materials, the clinical trials, we paid for all the renovations needed at the Moderna facilities to make all this happen. Moderna didn’t take on the risk. We taxpayers did. But when the Trump administration signed the contracts with Moderna to be the chefs of the vaccines, they didn’t require Moderna to share the recipes. And so they aren’t sharing. And the Biden administration so far, has sided with the Trump administration and the drug companies, and is refusing to support the effort to lift the patent protections on the vaccines that WE paid to invent. The Biden administration has all the leverage and legal authority it needs to tell these greedy companies, Moderna in particular, to share what we gave them for the good of the world. But instead, the Biden administration is dancing around the edges, choosing instead to donate doses, like a bunch of AstraZeneca ones that we just had stored in some closet somewhere. “Oh we’re donating those! Aren’t we great?” They want to funnel billions of our tax dollars to COVAX, that Gates inspired organization that buys vaccines from the monopoly drug companies, and passes them out to the poor. It’s all charity. But the problem is the monopolies. The problem is requiring the entire world to get the vaccine from these handful of chosen companies, and the ones that can’t afford it have to depend on … charity.
#ThrowbackThursday from the JMM Collections: Letters Patent for “Blouse-Bottom Cuffs” awarded to Edward Morris on April 29, 1924. Morris and Co. Records, JMM 2015.12.11.
“Nikola Tesla, in the opinion of authorities, today is conceded to be the greatest inventor of all times. Tesla has more original inventions to his credit than any other man in history. He is considered greater than Archimedes, Faraday, or Edison. His basic, as well as revolutionary discoveries for sheer audacity have no equal in the annals of the world. His master mind is easily one of the seven wonders of the intellectual world.“
–Hugo Gernsback
(“Nikola Tesla and His Inventions — An Announcement.” Electrical Experimenter, January, 1919.)
Today we observe National Inventors Day, celebrated each year on Thomas Edison’s birthdate. Edison held 1,093 patents – a record for sure!
We are sharing this image from The Mission Indian newsletter dated February 1935. It depicts a home-made plow from the gold rush days, which they describe as “crude,” but in those days, people had to make do with what they had available. The resourcefulness and perseverance of these early pioneers was remarkable.
May 23 1916 #OTD US patent, US1184078A, granted to Charles J. Cooke for a repeating firearm with trench periscope. “a veritable stream of death-dealing missiles may thus be literally poured into the invading ranks, from numberless rapid fire machine arms”
Patent US1267212A for Side Car for Motor Cycles. Invented by C. J. Gustafson and issued by the United States Patent Office May 21 1918
COVID is slowly becoming a “third world” disease. While first world countries are hoarding vaccines, having doses for populations many times their size, third world countries can’t get any because pharma companies want to sell to the first world countries first. Even then, first world countries will receive them first. While rich countries recover from COVID, they will forget about the pandemic while many other countries live the absolute worst moment of the pandemic without being able to vaccinate their population.
Watch also when some first world countries finish vaccinating their populations, they will turn to third world countries and “donate” or sell surplus vaccines. People in these countries will go “Oh how sweet! The government is donating vaccines to the poorer countries <3” when it was their hoarding that led to many, many third world citizens dying before they could even get vaccinated in the first place.
african and latin american countries are also pushed by pfizer to give up sovereign assets as part of their vaccine agreement
They’re not only hoarding and blackmailing, but the cherry on top is that the US, UK, Australia, most of Europe, Brazil et al. actually voted AGAINST waiving intellectual property agreements for the existing vaccines, something that India & South Africa proposed MONTHS ago to the World Trade Organization, and which most of the Global South voted yes to. So rather than letting countries manufacture these vaccines themselves, meaning they could have their own supply, they’re being kept, by multiple measures, beholden to the Global North for donations. The US voted multiple times to block this, before and after Biden’s inauguration.
[Image description: a world map. Countries in black (US, Brazil, most of Europe, Japan, Australia) opposed; countries in green (Africa not including Algeria/Libya/Western Sahara/Eritrea; China, South Asia, and most of southeast Asia; and Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua) are co-sponsors/full supporters; countries in yellow (Canada, Mexico, Chile) are undecided; countries in light brown (Colombia, Guyana, Suriname, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam, Thailand, Bhutan, the Phillipines, and Papua New Guinea) are general supporters; and the remainder are gray, which is not designated as anything]
Until recently, invention and patenting have been guy things, though not for women’s lack of innovation. Cristen and Caroline discover the American history of women inventors and why the patent gender gap has been so challenging to close.
Image description: A mitten with spiked metal plates on the palm side of the fingers and thumb, and a strong metal wire serving as a spring to either open or close the grip (it’s not clear which).
