As you all know, teleportation is easy. But one cannot make a teleporter due to the crazy US Patent system. And it’s frustrating me.

Like you all, I am pretty tired of traveling to airports via trains and monorails, waiting in check-in lines, fighting those darn kiosk things, standing in baggage lines, standing in TSA lines, removing shoes and belt, getting frisked, getting dressed then waiting in dingy boarding areas with horrid coffee and no useable wifi only to spend hours upon hours squished in small cramped seats with bland food and annoying strangers, just to get somewhere.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just beam myself to Bangkok to pick up some Pad Thai, then beam over to my family home in Sydney to share this meal with them, then beam home back to New York to start the workday. And yes, this example is bad because bringing foodstuffs into Australia is illegal so I won’t really do that. So maybe I can to beam to Shanghai to buy the latest toys, then beam to Sydney for my nephew’s birthday, and still be back home in time for the morning meeting.

The thing is, the hardware for a teleportation device is really easy to come by. You just need some parts from the local electronics store, some well shielded cable from the local electrician, some good leather belts from your local clothing discounter, and a good car battery that you can get from any auto store. Make the coils, connect the electronics, wire in the battery, hook up a computer to control it all (the new model Macbook Air is perfect) and the hardware is done.

For the record, this does not violate United States Patent Application: 0060071122 because I am using directed gravity waves not pulsed ones, the wormhole does not intersect hyperspace and you don’t need any obelisks. And I’m not using qubits or ancilla so United States Patent: 7006267 also does not apply. So there’s no issue on the hardware. By the way, anyone know what an ancilla is?

But the software required is another problem. I mean, its easy to write and test. The specifications are clear and I have 22 years of experience writing the stuff. But most of its components are patented and there’s no way I can afford to beg, buy and license all of them to make it the whole thing work.

You see, the software needs to run a full body scan to initially determine the bounds of the body and that which is being carried. It’s important to get the bounds right as we don’t want to teleport the ground I am standing on, that would use up too much battery. But the scan itself is patented via patents in Xray scans, millimeter wave scans, CT Scans (William Watson patented axial transverse tomography) and Microsoft (their scan uses Kinect hardware to guess your age). There’s no other way to do it, so I need to license all of these.

Then the software needs to document and record each atom in your body, with its state and location, so that the reconstruction at the other end is perfect. Unfortunately, this too hits patents with geolocation, database, keying and indexing, cryptography (it’s best not to get hacked while teleporting) and encoding. In fact, almost all the code I need to write has been patented by someone already, and they are enforcing these out of empty offices in Texas with millions in VC money behind them. Ideally I could beam there, burn them down and beam home, but I’d first have to license the patents to make the teleporter to enable me to beam there in the first place legally.

Assuming I get those patents, the next step, transmission, has even more patents to deal with. Protocols are patented, checksumming is patented, packet sizes are patented, ether transmission is patented. And we haven’t even gotten to the legal issues of using spectrum that’s not allocated by the FCC for both wormhole propagation and atomic transmission. I really don’t want to get into how it is possible for the FCC to regulate quantum dimensions, but it seems within their legal bailiwick.

And then there’s the reconstruction step violations, Luc Montagnier has this one. And then there are DNA patents that prevent the reconstitution of patented DNA, even though it’s my own DNA. Materials that are carried are treated as new in reconstruction, requiring a licensing fee. If I carry any medication, then recreation violates the medical patent.

Used to be that a patent required an invention, an physical implementation of the idea. But these days, anyone can patent anything, and so even something as simple as teleportation is being held back by these ridiculous patents. So, instead of building some electronics, writing some software and beaming off to Sydney next week, I’m going to have to spend well over a day of my valuable time dealing with the TSA, airports and airlines. What a waste!

Thwarted.

And oh, yes, I’ll be on vacation the next four weeks.