RicRicho

Partial List:

• 2007
Polaroid based heads up display for consumer use.
Wireless telephone answering system for centralized message management.
Blind-spot mirror design for safe driving.
Audit Server – a new approach to software license management.
Software Throttling – a user friendly way of managing software copy counting.
System for adjustable flex in surfboard design (patent writer and invention advisor)
• 2006
Universal Database - Ever wanted to capture responses from visitors to your site without setting up a database or a mailto form? R2Labs Universal Database is a simple multi-use database that captures data from forms on your web page and forwards the results to you privately using email… a simple but much needed facility for the web.
• 2005
Password Packing - With key loggers and Trojans waiting to snatch your banking password something is needed to make their life a bit harder. Password Packing is a technique that adds nonsense characters to your password making it harder for a hacker to know what your password is yet no harder for you to remember.
Site Triage - A simplified password system for people who want privacy but do not want their visitors to sign up for anything
Cyclical Unlock codes - Unlocking codes for software that evades brute force number crunching attacks.
• 2004
Terremail - Send from email to post box.
• 2003
Personal Server - Automates collection of important information on your home computer and gets it to you over the web or on your cell or pda.

Digital Furnace - One computer for the whole household, a new multi-user approach to household computing.
Wireless Repeater - Uses light sockets to power wireless internet connections around the home and around the world.
Push payment system - Provides web buyers with a way to pay people over the web without using sellers shopping cart. Privacy
MicroPMT - Want to pay 2 cents to see an important page on the web…
Pop Central - An experiment using push technology to flash information to the user without interrupting their workflow.
Cell Redirector - Centralize your phone calls at home or on the move with automatic call cost optimization between your cell and home phone line accounts.
Cell2Cell2World - Use two cell phones to make all your calls from a landline while on the move.
• 2000
Logarex - A new way of compressing data using Logarithms.
Installer image wrapper patent.
• 1992
The Uniloc patent – locking a license to a specific device using hardware fingerprinting

Back in 1995 an opportunity came up to do a world first… combine a popular computer game AND digital music onto one CD. The game was an unlockable Uniloc-enabled copy of shoot-em-up DOOM and the music of the popular pop group Kulcha.

The idea was that the CD was purchased for the music and every buyer would get the opportunity to install and try the game DOOM as an added bonus. The game would only work for the first few levels of the game but would have to be purchased by getting an unlock code over the phone to play the game fully. It really worked well because the same kids that got into Kulcha aslo were only starting to get into computer games.

The album was set to be released by Warner Music but there was one big problem. When a CD player started playing it would try to play the game data which sounded like million gnats flying out your speakers and did real speaker damage.

A simple invention that I unfortunately never patented was the idea of hiding the game data from the CD players index, thereby tricking the player to see the fist track as the fisrt music track rather than the data. It worked. And the Kulcha CD was a success.

The CD was used as a lead component in a presentation to visiting Time Warner Chairman Gerald Levin, and resulted in an invitation to Ric to come visit the fortune 100 company later that year.

From the Uniloc website:
Device locking was invented by Uniloc’s founder, Ric Richardson, in 1992. Uniloc was subsequently granted the seminal device locking patent in 1996: US 5,490,216; System for Software Registration.

Today, Uniloc has over 10 related patents pending which leverage the power of device locking into several new markets and applications.

This is my first and most well known patent written back in 1992 in Australia and granted in the US in 1996. The patent covers the concept of locking a specific software licesne to a specific machine. This approach has been used by most of the world’s top software publishers and is even beginning to be used to secure financial and banking web transactions.

Ric has been working on businesses that exploit the patent ever since he invented the concept in 1992.

Reviewing the tags for DRM and copy control on Technorati, the blogosphere search engine and other places it is clear that there is a real concern by users about Activation in terms of the longevity/ business viability publishers and the consumers rights to use their own software if the product requires re-activation but the publisher no longer supports the activation server or worse has gone out of business.

An idea I came up with spilling out of the discussion is that consumer supportive publishers, advertise that they have a copy of their software in an unprotected state and tell them how to get a hold of the un-protected version of the product in the event that something happens to their ability to provide activation…

Possibly a kind of voluntary escrow where a group of consumers can petition a 3rd party to release the unprotected version of the software citing the publishers inability to live up to their side of the bargain namely to ensure that the user retains reasonable rights to use their purchased software.

I can see a simple banner-ad system and an escrow account with a long legged law firm (one that will outlive most of the publishers) and even the option for the consumers to pay as a group to have the software released for a small stipend. And then possibly somewhere down the track, something reasonable like say 10 years, the lawyer is allowed to destroy the software.

Seth Godin rightly opines regarding automated computer responses to enquries:

“There’s a middle ground, one that is not computer-decided. It’s based on a human being treating another human being the way they’d like to be treated.”

This very issue is, I believe, at the heart of the DRM debate… DRM debate?

My point. Anyone who makes a living from intellectual property knows the value of keeping your rights as author, but DRM has become a whipping stick to force the law abiding public to accept unreasonable software licensing terms.

Someone who buys a $50 piece of software or even a $300 copy of Windows should not be expected to invest the time and energy into understanding and thinking of the ramifications of a twenty page user agreement… (that box we all click when we install the software binding us to who knows what).

Fair use should cover us… the licence is between the publisher and me.. Im the buyer… not the computer… and if I want to use it on my 10 PCs then thats ok.. its me using my software on 10 machines… Microsoft or anyone else should not stop me, the same way as i should be able to photocopy a chapter from a book I bought and read it on the train.

As an inventor in the space, and a key DRM patent under my belt… I should know. Technology can be used to help people do the right thing… it IS smart enough to let a consumer use the software on their own 5, 10 or even 15 machines but also detect when a kid has shared the software with their whole dorm… or the bittorent community… copy control is not the problem… publisher greed is…