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Patents For Open Source Projects?

Posted by timothy on from the but-this-is-an-*internet*-yo-yo dept.

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.

2 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. They are not trying to provide patents! by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5
    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

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  2. No Thanks by Duncan+Cragg · · Score: 5
    • 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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