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Friday, August 13, 2010

Hartvigsen's Post to Yahoo Microhydro Group Claiming Turgo Design Ownership, Dec.12, 2005

Hartvigsen's Post to Yahoo Microhydro Group Claiming Turgo Design, Dec.12, 2005

Saturday, July 08, 2006
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From: "Joseph Hartvigsen" Add to
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Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:58:31 -0000
Subject: [microhydro] Re: Swedish Turgo design

Since this posting was given anonymously, without any
background, and
is fishing for a collective group judgement and
condemnation against
me (Joe) and Peter, I'll provide the background.

The request was for what is legally public
information. No identification or explanation is
required. How could that be fishing for a judgement
against, unless you cannot back up your claims?


First, the inquirer he didn't identify himself. The
question is
(either directly or indirectly) coming from Ron Davis,
an American
living for several decades in LaPaz Bolivia.

His organization, Campo
Nuevo, is focused on appropriate technologies for the
camposinos or
poor native farmers in the high Andes, including low
cost greenhouses,
water tanks and a water motor used to drive a variety
of devices such
as saws, grain mills, alternators etc. from a water
turbine.
http://www.watermotor.net/

Ron, Peter and I are among the earliest members of
this group. Some 7
or so years ago after exchanging emails and turbine
pictures, Peter
mailed me an envelope of turgo spoons that he had
obtained from the
inventory held by the widow of the man who designed
and produced them
- some distance north of Peter's location in Sweden. I
built a runner
for my system in Idaho using the larger orange spoons,
and for another
fellow in Boone North Carolina using the smaller size
blue spoons
before Ron came into the picture.

This is deliberately misleading. As a matter of fact,
as they admitted at the time, neither Ruyter nor
Hartvigsen had ever seen this turgo design in action,
or could name a single location where it was in use.


I had read about Ron's work with the watermotor and
asked if he was
interested to see how these little turgo runners would
perform in his
system in place of a pair of plastic 100mm pcd Pelton
runners. He
bought a set of blue spoons (at a cost equal to what I
paid Peter who
in turn bought them from the estate of their designer
- because of my
appreciation of Ron situation and the humanitarian
cause he was
addressing). I also gave Ron a hub set.

Spare me! After buying a few hundred dollars of the
small spoons from “Hartvigsen Hydro”, I learned that
he could not provide a diagram of the hub require by
the design. Instead, he had a friend make a poorly
fitting plastic hub for me (sized in inches, not
metric as were the spoons),. This was two little
pieces of plastic two inches across. He has brought
this up many times. Sometimes Hartvigsen claims to
have gifted me valuable tools I required for my work.
How shameless!
The idea here is to give the reader the impression
that he has provided significant help to my
Watermotor.project. In reality his fraudulent claims
and slanderous accusations have been incredibly
damaging to my project.


He was happy that he got more
power from one runner than he had previously from two
and ordered some
more blue spoons along with a few of the larger orange
spoons. He has
not requested to order anything since.

The truth is directly and totally contrary to what he
wrote here. And I can prove it. He flatly refused to
sell me more small spoons unless I agreed to pay him
his self granted “royalties” on the larger turgo
spoons I produce in Bolivia. Do I smell a lawyer?

.

Enough time has passed that I can't recall whether it
was before
ordering the orange spoons, or shortly after that he
mentioned his
interest in casting metal copies of them locally.

Check the email record, Joe! The fact is that I told
him from the beginning that I intended to produce the
large spoons here. That is obviously why I only bought
four of them. He either did not come up with the idea
to con us into paying him “royalties” until later,
when, after building and testing it, I told him how
good I thought the turgo runner was, or possibly
planned this scam from the beginning.


I inquired of Peter
and we agreed that it would be appropriate to pay an
amount equal to
half the sales price of a plastic spoon if people
wanted to copy the
spoons, so that the widow could receive something for
the copied
parts.

This is a very cheap attempt to get people to think
that I have been cheating some poor old woman. It
stinks, Joe!
Hartvigsen originally began this scam by asking for
“donations” to build a hydro plant for the mysterious
“widow”, whose full name or address he could never
provide.Then it was for her “design rights”. When I
said that I would need to know where the money was
going, he came up with the con game you see below.
Ruyter told me that I could meet the “widow” if I
came to Sweden!


I told Ron of this agreement, and offered to buy some
of his
castings from him at a sufficient markup so that the
expense of the
royalty would be covered. He never replied to my
offer. I offered to
personally pay the royalty if he would tell me how
many he has sold.
He never replied to that offer either, but instead
keeps harrassing us
as to our right to collect the royalty.

Now he is talking “royalties”. Then as now, we simply
asked, “To whom are we paying royalties, and for
what?” He never had an answer, then or now. Absolutely
nothing to offer! Asking this is not “harassment”
unless you are trying to con someone.
Obviously we were just supposed to take it on his
word that he, an engineer in Utah, had the right to
collect money from us for turbines we make in Bolivia.
And this is coming from someone trained by his company
in intellectual property right!.


We have never claimed to own a patent on the design,
nor have we
threatened any legal action.

See for yourself. The message below was sent to me
by Peter Ruyter on Dec. 16, just after Hartvigsen’s
first posting Needless to say, he could offer no
documentation to back up his extortionist threats.


To: "davis ron"
From: "Peter Ruyter" View
Contact Details Add Mobile Alert

Subject: Plasticspoons

Mr Davis
I can one moore time tell you: You are at the wrong
side of normal
sense. I am the owner of all produced plastic spoons,
red, white and
blue. If anybody without my autorization copie one of
these products
for using to make repeting production of these
products I am able to
lead these activities to court in any civilized
country around the world as a case of illegal use of
copyright.

Neither have I refuse to sell him spoons
because of his failure to abide by our request.

He certainly did exactly that! Soon after I had
designed the Watermotor, and began the long process of
patenting the control mechanism that makes it
practical for directly running machines, he began
trying to extort money with his fraudulent claims.


And, it has probably
been 5-6 years since I have brought up the issue with
Ron.

Another shameless wopper! (Do I smell a lawyer?)
Actually only a few months before posting this he had
been reminding me that I owed him royalty payments,
something he tells everyone, many times, and has for
years,as he is telling the group right here


So what this comes down to is that we said to Ron if
we are going to
sell you just a few plastic spoons so that you can
copy them, we
request that you pay a royalty on the copies that you
sell.

Completely untrue! Show me where you wrote that to
me! Shall we compare emails?


His
watermoter with the plastic blue spoons sells on his
web site for 480
USD (plus shipping), I was charging him 40 USD (no
markup at all) for
a set of the plastic spoons. His watermotor with the
copied orange
spoons sells for 695 USD (plus shipping), the royalty
would have been
32 USD.

Somehow the idea of paying a design royalty on direct
physical copies
offends him, and he feels that the design should be
public domain.

Show me your right to collect “design royalties”, or
any other kind.
And I have never ever made “direct physical copies”of
the turgo spoons you sell. Not that it would be any of
your business.
Show me any proof you can provide showing that the
design is NOT in public domain. Why can’t your
“partner” Ruyter back up your claims to the right to
collect royalties, as is required by law?


We
aren't talking about the general concept of a turgo
runner - which is
public domain, we're talking about a copy made by a
rubber mold
directly around one of the plastic parts we provided
him.
.

Completely and shamelessly untrue!! Just show me a
single example of a turgo spoon produced by me as you
describe, or any “direct” copy.


He is free
like anyone else to sit down at a CAD system to design
a part and
email the file to a mold maker who can use CAM
software to machine the
mold.

Thanks, Joe.

Now some things have changed since then. Peter has
bought all the
inventory, tooling and any interest in the design from
the man's
estate. So, Peter now owns it, whatever there is to
own.

Well, then I guess maybe Ruyter can show us exactly
on what we are being asked to pay royalties. But of
course he can’t, can he?
Is “whatever there is to own” Hartvigsen’s fallback
position? That is, he himself never actually knew on
what basis Ruyter was claiming the right to collect
royalties, just taking his word for it, just as we
were supposed to take HIS word for the right to
collect royalties from us?
Wait!My guess is that we will find out next that
Hartvigsen was being conned by Ruyter.


Peter and I have jointly invested in precision CNC
machined metal molds for
waxes used in precision investment castings of these
parts. These
parts are cast not in bronze or recycled aluminum, but
in a high
strength and hardness, heat treated stainless turbine
alloy. We are
also now designing similar, but not identically scaled
spoons in other
sizes (using an elliptical profile mathematically
optimized to closely
match the cylinder/hemisphere design of the plastic
parts). We have
considerable investment in the wax molds and foundry
setup charges. We
feel it perfectly justifyable, even without worldwide
patent coverage
to request as terms of sale that anyone wanting to
make copies
directly imprinted from any of these parts be willing
to negotiate a
per copy royalty.

Great! Nice advertisement for yourself.
But what has that got to do with me? I have never
even seen the turgo spoons you are talking about.
This was written to deliberately mislead the group
into thinking that I had copied his design, which he
must be claiming as some kind of improvement of his
own .
This is a clear example of the calculated and
intentional duplicity that characterizes his entire
message.


However no one has been interested as the price and
quality of the parts we offer are good enough that
such effort is not
justified.

Not if you don’t mind paying a thousand dollars for a
turgo runner.


I have a full time job as a research engineer, and
am not
trying to make a living from selling hydro parts.

Joe is too modest!
He is actually a senior scientist at a well known
company in Utah, Ceramatec, that specializes in
testing and evaluating inventions. Ceramatec provides
special training to its employees to help them
understand and deal with intellectual property.
I personally know a lot about this because, at
Hartvigsen’s suggestion, I had the misfortune to
submit an invention that I had produced here in
Bolivia to Ceramatec for testing.
Two years later I was coolly informed that
Hartvigsen, and the company owner, Ashok Joshi, had
themselves somehow become “co-inventors” of my
invention! Imagine how surprised I was.
Recently, a patent lawyer told me that it was illegal

for a company to accept an invention for testing and
then secretly claim themselves as co-inventors. I’m
not surprised. Nor am surprised that Hartvigsen would
do such a thing.
I also found out that, with the knowledge of the
company owner, Hartvigsen had kept all of my
correspondence sent to Ceramatec regarding my
invention out of the company business records.


One of the first things Hartvigsen told me about
himself when we first began corresponding regarding
the Swedish turgo spoons was that he and his family
were very close to their church, and that he had once
been a missionary. He even offered to send
missionaries to my home in Bolivia. I found that this
was probably true when he told me later that his
bishop Robert Rees could crack into email addresses,
and then he provided an example. So I had better watch
out!


Currently, Hartvigsen is the head of a red-hot
federally funded project for converting nuclear energy
into car fuel.(Search: Hartvigsen nuclear) The object
is to use excess nuclear generating power and heat to
make hydrogen, and create the most centralized form of
energy ever produced. Kind of the opposite to
micro-hydro.
Imagine how happy this must make some corporate
boardroom members!
Because of this Hartvigsen and his company have been
granted special recognition by the U.S. government and
protection by the Department of Homeland Security. Not
surprisingly, Hartvigsen is (or was, like many

Americans), an ardent supporter of Bush’s war against
Iraq. He has referred to the president of Bolivia, who
we support, absurdly as a “communist”.
While he, naturally, has a right to his views, I
doubt that he feels that we share the same right. In
my long experience individuals with his political
views are predictably unsympathetic to efforts to

empower indigenous people, or really believe in human
rights for those they disagree with. I think that, for
him, our political differences have given him, in his
own mind, the right, or even obligation, to defame,
lie, cheat and steal from us with a clear patriotic
church going conscience. He might even see it as
fighting terrorism.

And if he happens to make out personally, so much the
better. Hasn’t it always been this way with his brand
of patriotism?


Rather I'm trying to
increase the scope of products that are offered to
cover as many site
needs as possible.

What a relief!! Just trying to help humanity.
I was afraid that he was trying to con everyone into
thinking that he and his partner had the right to
collect royalties on a valuable invention with which
they had absolutely nothing to do with creating, and,
furthermore, that he was trying to damage my personal
and business reputation by telling everybody that I
was ripping him off!


Again, this is not an issue that I'm raising, but
since Ron has raised
it in public, I'll address it in public. You can draw
your own
conclusions.

Joe

I think that the members have a right to know that
while Hartvigsen was allowed by the group moderator to
repeat the above statements and accusations to the
members several times, I was never allowed to reply,
or have since been allowed by him to clear my name
from these accusations It seems that Hartvigsen
anticipated that this would be the case before he made
them.
Nor has the moderator ever seen fit to explained why
he continued to post Hartvigsen’s messages to the
group after being advised that they were misleading

untruthful and fraudulent. This is a matter for the
members to decide, since I was threatened with
expulsion if I did not remain silent about this. I
know one thing: Nobody, but nobody, has the right to
prevent me from replying to public accusations, and
then cover up the fact, as has been done in this case.
That is nothing but fascism, something which I will
never be party to by being intimidated into silence. I
am putting all of the e-mail correspondence regarding

this matter on the Internet,and invite hartvigsen,
Ruyter, and Wim Klunne to do the same. As Hartvigsen
said, “You can draw your own conclusions”.
In the six months since Hartvigsen posted this message
to the world’s largest micro-hydro power e-group, and
in spite of his definite and repeated assertions, he
has yet to provide a shred of evidence of any kind
whatsoever that either he, or his partner Peter
Ruyter, have any conceivable right to collect
royalties on the Swedish turgo design we produce here
in Bolivia for our Watermotor turbines.



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joseph hartvigsen ceramatec turgo turbine yahoo microhydro wim klunne peter ruyter brian kunzler bolivia internet fraud extortion sweden lds mormon h-hydro water motor
watermotor ron davis

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