Anti-Patent

Hi! My name is Luke, and I love designing things. I worked in a boatyard through highschool and college, and studied aerospace engineering. I’ve been around composites for a while, but I had never made a surfboard until a couple years ago. At Blueprint Surf, I’ve done a lot of guessing what might work based on techniques used on boats or aircraft, or based on something I learned in college 15 years ago. Mike, my partner at Blueprint Surf, then figures out techniques and specifics to actually make those ideas work. Or, the ideas never work and Mike wonders why he ever listens to me.

In this blog, I’m going to post about ideas for new technology. Patents are weird things… they’re selfish, obstructive, and confrontational. I have about a dozen of them on ideas in other industries. They can be worth a lot of money, and Mike and I don’t want any patents at Blueprint Surf. One of the things that makes surfboard shapers so mythical is that anyone can make a surfboard, but the best shapers separate themselves with technique, practice, and attention to detail. Patents would just prevent other shapers from applying their skills to our ideas. Or, someone else could patent an idea and then hold it hostage whether or not they’re going to work on it, preventing me and Mike from using our combination of skills and experience. We think that’s super counter-productive for surfers everywhere.

For that reason, I’m going to use my blog posts to write about technologies Mike and I have worked on, or ideas we want to try in the future. By law, once someone puts an idea in the public domain, no one can patent it. 3d-printed surfboards are a pretty new thing, so there are still lots of untested ways that they could improve surfing. I’m going to think up and write about as many of those new ideas as possible in this blog. I hope that, as more and more people learn to use 3d-printing and recycled plastics, they’ll perfect some of these ideas… if Mike and I haven’t already.

Cheers!