Patents For Open Source Projects?

A nameless reader writes: "Salon has an interesting article on an organization and a company that are teaming up together to try to provide free software programmers with patents to protect free software in general from the corporate grip." The Salon article is about IP.com, a company (surprisingly, with the Patent office's promise to check their database) planning to put patentable ideas online as evidence of first creation, for a much smaller fee than filing a patent. If the idea appeals to you, check out openpatents.org as well -- the idea there being that the right to pool patents is a good incentive not to keep technologies locked up for more than a decade.

Comments

They are not trying to provide patents!

[Bruce Perens]

They are not trying to provide patents to Open Source authors! They are providing Open Source folks with the ability to put our art in a prior-art database that patent office folks will search. For free if you go through Foresight, for less than $20 if you go directly to IP.com .

I agree that software patents are bad. As someone whose Open Source project appears as prior art in a patent, reducing its scope (search for "Perens" in the patent database), I do think this might help us a bit.

Thanks

Bruce

Great Idea!

[MobyDisk]

Hello Open Source Advocates! I'm starting a service where, for a small fee, you can give me all your patentable ideas so that I can protect them. IPthieves.com will patent your idea, with no additional cost to you, and keep the information in our protected database. We assure you that we will NOT parent your ideas then use them to steal your software and sue you to your grave. All this for only $20 per patent. Submit 10 patentable ideas and get a free "IPthieves.com" T-SHIRT!

USPTO now exposes Patent Applications

[Speare]

A press release on www.uspto.gov indicates that the USPTO now exposes patent applications before they finish the grant. This makes it possible for third parties to challenge the grants as obvious or covered by prior art.

This was one of my "stock rant" solutions. Since the USPTO is a source of revenue for Congress, it has incentive to grant patents for a fee, and it has incentive to minimize the work it does to consider or invalidate applications.

Re:Provisional Patent Application.

[cworley]

The provisional patent is intended to allow you to sell your idea to a company withing twelve months, then let them go thru the expensive patent process.

It does have it's drawbacks (many):

For example, you loose your provisional patent filing date if you don't file for patent the within the 12 month period.

I don't think this is the proper solution. Letting it lapse gives you no claim to prior art.

Provisional Patent Application.

[gargle]

Why not just submit a provisional patent application? Read a description here. The idea is that you submit a provisional application for a patent, and then follow up with an actual patent application within 12 months. For the purpose of establishing prior art, one can submit the provisional application, but then let it lapse.

It's dirt cheap ($75 for a small entity), and it's a pretty much bullet proof prior art evidence since I believe your application will be kept on file by the PTO (someone correct me if this is not the case).

Re:What is the point of 'Free' patents?

[antis0c]

The point of this is the current Patent system does not work. And we've all seen this many times over (see Articles on Amazon, TechSearch, NCR, and Apple). They Parent insane things like One Click Shopping, Aqua Color Theme, and Compression between a Client and a Server.. These people didn't patent this because they were afraid their great new idea would be stolen by a huge corporation, or by another individual, they patented so competition legally couldn't compete and so that they could wait until the rest of the world had popular devices like theirs, with many companies producing them, and then sue/charge licensing fees for them. That is whats wrong. What this place does is allow us Open Source programmers to patent our ideas or at least record prior art so that we don't one day get a letter from Apple saying that we violate their patent on the creation of a text file containing specific code to be run through a preprocessor, compiler and linker to create a distributable executable binary. Sure GCC has prior art.. but thats not the case for all open source projects, it could be very hard to prove..

Re:Does this make sense? - Yes

[NoNeeeed]

The Open Source movement would do just as well by having a central repository or library of "prior art" that can be used by the patent office to determine if a "new invention" is indeed a new invention. We need to make it easier to prevent patents on core knowledge; I don't see the point in making more patents when our goal is to prevent patents.

You havn't actually read the article have you? It states...

Specifically the joint venture will give open-source and free-software developers the chance to "defensively publish." For a fee of $20 per document (a significant discount over IP.com's usual $100 fee), software inventors will be able to place their innovations in a searchable software database.

Inventors will be assured that patent examiners will see innovations that might otherwise be lost to unseen Web pages or college papers.

So, if IBM tries to patent something that's been published in the IP.com database, for example, the inventor will have a better chance of beating the company in court.

Any idea placed on IP.com's system will be protected from patenting. Or there will at least be a stronger legal basis to stop patents. And since the database is checked by POs, dodgy patents are less likely to get passed if prior art is registered in the IP.com system.

Essentially this is patenting in reverse. Instead of preventing other people from using your idea without licensing it first, it stops people from patenting it and keeping it to themselves. It forces the concept to be open to all.

Please read articles before commenting on their contents.

Changing Patent Law.?

[Alien54]

Personally, I am tempted by the idea of "use it or loose it" as applied to patents. this would make patents more similar to trade marks in some way.

I am not sure this would work. but the idea is that if someone had a patent for the hyperlink system that they discover they had owned since 1979, that if they sat on it and did not develop it or otherwise did not choose to enforce it early and often, that it was a donation to the public domain in fact, if not in practice.

Another angle on this is the idea of different time lengths for patents. The problem is that there is a conflict between individuals and large corporations. Since we are horrified by the prospect of the actions of Large Corporations.

What would happen if MS patented their .NET or their HailStorm technology? (see description here in a spicy article in the Register) - or a large segment of it in many smaller pieces?

One thought is to have patents held by corporations be far more limited in time than patents by individuals. 5 years for corporate p[atents from the time of original filing, not renewable, vs the traditional 15 -20 years for individuals.

This is something we need to think about because the current answers are not Good Enough (tm) to do the job.

I see it somewhat differently...

[ChaoticCoyote]

...although I must admit, the /. article is a bit misleading about the actualy intent of IP.com. Indeed, IP.com is providing a service to maintain a list of "publications" for use in "prior art" defenses against patents. However, the service is oriented at business, not Open Source per se, and it isn't free, either. The cost appears to be $109 per "publication", so the expense isn't high.

HOWEVER, using IP.com implies trust that they (and their database) will continue to exist, and that their intent will remain "noble." Perhaps a grassroots equivelent would be more in the spirit of Open Source.

The main points of my original article stand, however, even if they were somewhat misguided by reading the /. article before visiting IP.com.

--
Scott Robert Ladd
Master of Complexity
Destroyer of Order and Chaos

Does this make sense?

[ChaoticCoyote]

No.

In an ideal world, patents promote innovation by giving inventors an exclusive right to profit from their creations; in return for this financial benefit, the inventor must publish a detailed description of the invention, so others can build on it. It is a good system that has been perverted by modern corporate concepts.

Patenting Open source is -- well, patently stupid. By nature, Open Source is published, and it has no direct profit motive. A patent on Open Source does not promote innovation, because innovation exists in Open Source by default!

The Open Source movement would do just as well by having a central repository or library of "prior art" that can be used by the patent office to determine if a "new invention" is indeed a new invention. We need to make it easier to prevent patents on core knowledge; I don't see the point in making more patents when our goal is to prevent patents.

--
Scott Robert Ladd
Master of Complexity
Destroyer of Order and Chaos

No Thanks

[Duncan Cragg]

• IP.com is a dot-com. They are a commercial entity who plan to make money. They are not there for the benefit of free software. Their service is nothing we can't do ourselves, for nothing, with the right principles behind it.
• As the article says, they are a drop in the ocean of available 'prior art' data repositories.
• Patents are a bad thing and no amount of tail-chasing and legal niceties can get around that fact.
• If you have IP to protect, you should try and patent it yourself.
• If that fails, be thankful that the US patent system is in such a mess that it will eventually collapse under its own weight of stupidity.

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But, but, but

[ackthpt]

As Jim Allchin, a Microsoft troll, put it, this kind of thing is a challenge to innovation! I mean, the guy has a point. If you can't hoard the patent, a-la Rambus, and use it to crush competition, do a product very badly, and protect the worst crap you really want to sell, what's the point.

And just this morning, I read that our very kind President Bush wants to ensure we have enough arsenic and heavy metals in our drinking water.

God, the flag, Mom's apple pie, and barbarians at the gate, what could be more american?

--

You're kidding me.

[American AC in Paris]

(surprisingly, with the Patent office's promise to check their database)

Wow, there's a shocker. I mean, it's simply unfathomable that there may exist patent officers who aren't Shameless Corporate Bribemongers. In fact, I'd recommend you investigate your sources on that one--that is, if I didn't know that the suggestion would fall on deaf ears...

Honestly, folks. Yes, the USPTO has more than it's share of problems, and there are a number of bad apples in the bunch, but it's just snide to exhibit such shock at the thought that there may exist government employees who want to do their job right.

It'd be like me expressing surprise that there might exist a Salshdot editor that doesn't proselytize every time he or she posts a news article.