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Prior Art to Pinpoint vs. Amazon, from 1980's?
Gary Robinson writes "I'm in a fairly unique position with regard to the Pinpoint vs. Amazon case since I built a system in the mid-1980's which is commonly regarded as the first active service based on collaborative filtering. It was a voice-mail-based dating service called 212-ROMANCE. I still have the 8-inch CP/M source code disks as insurance against CF-related patent lawsuits. Today I've posted a discussion of the Pinpoint vs. Amazon case in the context of that prior art as well other prior art from the 1980's."
I guess submitting it to USPTO would count as a pretty good backup... ;-)
Patent # 5,884,282
Patent # 5,790,426
Both held by Gary B. Robinson aka. the poster of this story
Yeah, actually I copied it to 3.5-inch mac floppies at some point as well as to DAT. And I probably have it somewhere on my hard disk on the laptop I'm typing this from as well.
You're incorrect. The diligence is required between the date of conception and the actual reduction to practice. After that, you are merely required not to "abandon" the invention. Abandonment does not occur if you even have an intention of working on it again.
One other aspect, since we're discussing these legal technicalities... if you create an actual reduction to practice, and then use the invention publicly, you have one year to file a patent application or your own public use becomes prior art. So if you want to wait years, you have to keep it totally under wraps, but have solid proof of the relevant dates.