While I appreciate the nice things Janine Robben wrote about me and our winery ("Son of Invention," WW, Aug. 25, 2004), her article's characterization of my father's career and of the Lemelson Foundation demands a response.

My father's story was complex and not easily written in a few pages. Let's start with the allegation that my father never brought his inventions to market, which supposedly justifies much of the criticism of his success. This story has been retold so often from the corporate perspective that it is accepted as fact.

Had your reporter asked, I would have told her that my father did bring several consumer products to market over the years. He also worked for decades to convince corporations to produce his patented inventions, with some limited success.

The more important point, however, is that our patent laws do not require that an inventor bring a product to market to protect intellectual property. Such a requirement would eliminate the independent inventor from the picture almost completely. I can cite numerous cases where independent inventors offered their patented inventions to corporations, only to be rejected and later find that their work had been pilfered. Their only means of redress lies in the court system, and the article's basic premise would effectively deny them access to justice.

The article also highlights criticism of the Lemelson Foundation by a vocal litigant. While noting that the Foundation is the third largest in Oregon, Robert Shillman of Cognex is quoted as saying that we give a "small percentage" of the income from my father's patents to charity, and he implies that our Foundation is somehow illegitimate.

In interviews with both me and our foundation director, WW was told that the bulk of the income from my father's patents has gone to charity (i.e., to the Lemelson Foundation) since his death, but the article omits that fact. Let's ignore for the moment the logical inconsistency (the implication that Oregon's third largest charitable foundation, with $90 million in grants awarded to date, is somehow illusory), and the fact that Shillman is the plaintiff in current litigation against several of my father's patents. Shillman's, shall we say, unusual use of language to the Associated Press ("[I hope they] burn in hell"), and the fact that he has sent threatening emails to me and my family, speaks volumes about his credibility. Readers might also be interested to know that the top executives of the other plaintiff in the litigation, Symbol Technologies, have been indicted for securities fraud.

The article also completely ignored the Foundation's major programs in the developing world, focused on improving basic living standards and encouraging grassroots inventors and innovators to solve pressing problems such as access to clean water. Given that we are committing half of our funding to this program, I found it odd that you failed to mention it at all.

I am disappointed, but not surprised, that WW chose to rework an old story, composed largely of a corporate interpretation of my father's career. The more interesting, and I believe more accurate, story is of an individual who personally challenged a long history of corporate abuse of individual inventors, in spite of an organized smear campaign that created the image that your reporter apparently relied on for much of the material in the article. I detect irony in WW defining itself as an "alternative" newspaper when it prints articles like this one.

Eric Lemelson
Carlton