Securing a New Idea for the Public Domain?

piotru asks: "I live in Japan and am implementing a new idea in software. I was told that it deserves patenting, but I intend to make sure that it remains in public domain (preempting anyone else from patenting it). What can I do to make sure that no one else patents my idea? Here are some choices I have come up with: 1) Patent and apply free license; 2) Apply for the patent, then drop it (will be published with time stamp, and more than likely will be costly); or 3) Copyright the implementation (will have a time stamp, but will it remain compatible with the GPL?) Any ideas?" Some of these issues were touched on in an older story, but the basic premise remains a difficult issue. How would you go about releasing an idea to the public domain while making certain that close software couldn't co-opt it out from under you?

Comments

Copyright is not ''incompatible'' with the GPL

[Tom7]

In order to use the GPL at all, you must copyright your software. So just copyrighting it will of course not be incompatible with the GPL!

Just time-stamping it is supposed to work, although it seems that they'll grant patents for anything, regardless of prior art, these days. It might make sense to try to publish any obvious minor variations on the idea, too.

Publicly disclose a patent disclosure

[cybermancer]

Go through all the effort to make a patent disclosure, then make sure there is a public record of it. What you could do is also mail a copy of the disclosure to yourself via certified mail.

At least in the US once a public disclosure is made, if a patent is not filed within one year then the invention is not patentable. As long as you can later prove that you made said public disclosure (this the certified mailing) then it will be un-patentable by others.

If someone else tries to patent it after your disclosure and before the year then that is where the complete disclosure you made comes in. If you can prove that your disclosure is for the same invention as theirs then you successfully provided prior art.

Shouldn't cost you much.

The main draw back is that someone else could patent an improvement on your invention, and there would be nothing you could do to stop them. They would control that improvement, and if the improvement is a logical progression from your invention then it would effectively block your invention.

Ideally we need an organization like Creative Commons to hold public patents. It would be important that the organization could not have their portfolio purchased. If they had some funds to file for patents, and then the patents would be freely licensable. The catch is the license would have to disallow licensing to anyone who leverages an improving patent on those patents.

Since an improving patent is useless without a license on the patent on which it improves then an improved invention could not be manufactured. The only reason a business would have to file such a patent would be to block someone else from using the technology, but in doing so they would rob themselves of access to the entire patent portfolio of the holding organization.