 They had developed the process in 1974 as a "citizens' committee", but decided to create and trademark the new name in order to protect the process from commercialization.The practice of citizens' juries has thus been tightly regulated in the US.Virtually the same process was created in Germany in the early 1970s; American "inventor" Ned Crosby and German "inventor" Peter Dienel said that they did not learn of each other's work until 1985.