Have you ever received a dirty look from a fellow you just handed a collection of papers kept together with staples?

The wire not flattened enough by the stapler hurts.
Bloody fingers do not add to the positive impression of your offer.
It seems stingy. Didn’t it?
But being serious, how many of us were forced to use ring binders as early as in school and hate the brick-like contraptions? The rings are always in the way of your hand reaching the opposite page and the spine. The spine sticks out like a mountain, blocking the view and taking up your storage space even if it’s half empty.

 You may collect the full display of negative emotions toward Ring Binders here and there when searching the internet and blogs dealing with organizers. Teachers and students share their solutions to avoid and replace the infamous Ring-binder. They discuss: the disc-bound notebooks, Chicago screws, metal prongs, and a variety of other solutions designed with one goal in mind: to make it FLAT.

The rest of the adult population seems to have given up their hopes, seeing no solutions. 

But there is a Ring-less binder developed in Chicago. It contains no metal parts of any sort visible among competing solutions. Cut from a flat sheet of reinforced paper. No sticking out pieces, rings, or prongs. Nothing can hurt your fingers, and it binds any number of leaflets effortlessly. One universal size replaces the usual selection of ring binders designed for a specific number of sheets.

When I asked the designer why he spent his time designing solutions for the office supply industry when every CEO is eyeing electronic files and computers as replacements for paper documents, he said:

A piece of paper can last for hundreds of years without a power source. Can you find a similar hard drive? You print your family pictures to preserve them on paper. How many have you lost when kept in memory of your electronic devices? Of course, electronics have their role, but they are not solutions for everything.

Kids still go to school, and we all use tons of paper. We need a hard copy here and there. Where would I keep my records when all my hard drives for the last ten years are gone? I do not have to worry about compatibility or power supply with paper. Plus the cost. It is just a fraction of a penny per page.

There is a future for paper, but not everybody has enough imagination to see it. Certainly, it is time to offer something better than the museum quality 133year-old contraption (ring binder) created at the time the first steam engines entered the world. For those paying attention, it is clear that the public is searching for a replacement.

The big behemoths of industry in the US have no interest in upending their already existing sales and offer a simpler, less expensive, and very competitive to their offer product. As you probably know, competition in the US died under several decisions of the Supreme Court promoting the interest of Big tech. Infringers who have no interest in promoting competition to their well-established offerings. That is why many new products already available elsewhere will never have any chance of showing up in the US. As an inventor, I have bigger hopes in the EU since there is no anti-patent Big Tech lobby and no PTAB invalidating 84% of all nationally issued patents. In the US, small companies are quickly extinguished by big tech moneyed competition and domestic or Chinese infringers. At a certain point, when you see all roadblocks in the US, you start to think: What we inventors do here is out of desperation, not hope, knowing full well that we should look to have a startup and hope to survive elsewhere outside the US.

I know well the plight of independent inventors in the US.

The Supreme Court has made several inventions: “Patent ineligible” in direct defiance of Congress-made statutes and the U.S. Constitution’s Article I, Section 8, Clause 8. Plus, there is PTAB. Established by the 2011 Leahy Smith American invention Act, patent review board is known as the “Patents Killer squad.” PTAB is invalidating 84% of issued USPTO patents at the request of the competition. For people looking for more info, you should start searching for information about “Efficient Infringement,” describing how big US and Chinese corporations kill competitive startups in the US.

Suppose you wonder why you can have patents for certain types of technology abroad when, in the US, it is forbidden. I think the answer is clear. Big Tech doesn’t want competition.

We wish the designers good luck finding their future – but Abroad?

Do we wonder why 50% of foreign fillers in the German Patent office are from the US? With the EU unitary patent court and a pan-European patent on the horizon, the outflow from the US may only increase.

Do you need more information?    There is a movie, INNOVATION RACE, explaining the basics.  How China is winning the race we are losing.

It would help if you considered it your patriotic duty to support HR 5874, Senator Massie’s RALIA bill, by tossing away all the misgivings of the Supreme Court into the US patent law and creating conditions to restore US competitiveness.

Sorry, I should write about the Fellow with a bleeding finger handling my paperwork, but… More blood comes from other directions.

J.T.