Douglas C. Engelbart: X–Y Position Indicator for a Display System, US Patent 3,541,541

Edition

Scan of the printed patent linked from Google Patents (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/7d/13/7e/3fd1de4c37ed12/US3541541.pdf, 1-bit, 300 dpi, seven pages). Its first three pages, the sheets of drawings, are set side by side in the image at the top, each cropped to the drawing, its heading and its signatures and kept in black and white. The specification and the eight claims (pages 1 to 4, columns 1 to 8) are transcribed in full, word for word from the scan: the text of Google Patents served as a base, an OCR made for this poster (RapidOCR) was compared with it by script, every disagreement was settled on the scan, and every line was then read against the page images. The printed heading (“United States Patent Office” / “3,541,541” / “Patented Nov. 17, 1970” / “X–Y POSITION INDICATOR FOR A DISPLAY SYSTEM” / “Douglas C. Engelbart, Palo Alto, Calif., assignor to Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., a corporation of California” / “Filed June 21, 1967, Ser. No. 647,872” / “8 Claims”, and classification numbers) is set in the header of the poster, without the classification numbers, the place of the assignee and its state of incorporation. The list of references cited, the names of the examiners and the cross-reference classes printed after the claims are left out. Normalizations: words divided at line ends are rejoined without their hyphen (“up-down” and “on-off” keep their own); the running heads, column numbers and the line numbers of the margins are dropped; the bold type of the reference numerals is not kept; the section headings keep the capitals of the print. The spelling of the print is kept, including “digita output”, “directon”, “registation”, “Schmidt trigger”, “One subject of the invention”, “the readout scheme of FIG. 6” and “In the readout circuit of FIG. 5” (where FIG. 5 and FIG. 6 seem exchanged), “the disc 100 has its axes fixed” and “delay line 124”. The caption of the drawings is not a period text: it was written for this poster from the specification.

Rights

US Patent 3,541,541 was granted on 17 November 1970 and printed by the United States Patent Office. In the United States, the USPTO states that the text and drawings of a patent are typically not subject to copyright restrictions, the exceptions (37 CFR 1.71(d) and (e), 1.84(s)) applying only to a copyright or mask work notice printed in the patent, and this one carries none. In France, the rule of the shorter term (article L. 123-12 of the Code de la propriété intellectuelle, after article 7(8) of the Berne Convention): for a work whose country of origin is outside the European Union and whose author is not a national of a member state (Engelbart was a US national, Wikidata Q92614), the protection lasts no longer than in the country of origin, which grants none.

The USPTO states: “Subject to limited exceptions reflected in 37 CFR 1.71(d) & (e) and 1.84(s), the text and drawings of a patent are typically not subject to copyright restrictions.” (https://www.uspto.gov/terms-use-uspto-websites, section “Patent information”, retrieved 2026-09-27.)