So, I work in IP and love sailing, so time to merge the two in a little blog.
The America's Cup, whilst some distance from the average sailor, is generally seen as the pinnacle of sailing innovation. It's where the most money is spent for speed gains and the constantly changing format ensures that learning curve is kept relatively steep.
It's also the origin of first IP story I ever really paid attention to, long before I had anything to do with IP, Australia II's winged keel. The story, as I remember it at least, was that the keel of Australia II was kept from prying eyes during the Louis Vuitton Cup in August 1983 and the Americas Cup in September 1983. They lifted the boat of the water after each race and a tarpaulin was permanently draped around the boat to prevent their competitors from seeing their revolutionary keel.
The story goes that, if they had just had a quick look in the patent system of the time, the revolutionary keel would have been fully explained.
As with any good story, there is an element of truth but the factual details would be far less interesting. So, there was a patent application pending at the time of the 1983 America's Cup, including the challenger series, in the name of Norport Pty Ltd with the inventor being Ben Lexcen, the designer of Australia II.
The original patent application was filed in the Netherlands on 5 February 1982 and further applications, claiming priority to the original Netherlands application, were filed in the UK, Sweden, Australia, Italy and France. It seems a little surprising that no application was filed in the US, given that's where the America's Cup was held in 1983, but who knows what the commercial significance was back then.
Patent applications are generally published around 18 months from the first application, which would be August 1983, just when the Louis Vuitton Cup was held. In fact, the first publication was in Sweden on 6 August, followed by Australia on 11 August and the UK on 24 August.
So, on the day of the first race of the Louis Vuitton Cup in Rhode Island in the US on 11 August the patent application had been published for 5 days in Sweden (in Swedish). And, of course, this would have been a paper copy that you would, probably, have had to go to the patent office to read.
Perhaps, a clever operator might have thought to send someone to the Australian Patent Office by the end of the Louis Vuitton Cup in early September and they would have perhaps found the drawings above. So, the story is true but the reality of actually getting the information was much harder than it is nowadays.
I'm amazed and the brevity of the actual patent (see the GB version
here), I could have written a lot more on the subject and modern specification would never leave so little to the imagination.
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