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Public Patents?
Lettuce asks: "While driving along today, I was mulling over patents. One of the problems with patents, from an open source perspective, is they cost money to acquire. Not only do you have to pay the Patent Office for them, you usually need to obtain the services of some lawyer. Which means you'll usually never see someone patent an idea just so that it can be public domain. What if we lobby our congressmen and senators to wave the charges for patents and even provide patent assistance, for those of us who would patent an idea for the public. With that simple change, couldn't people could flood the patent office with simple ideas and prevent abusers from patenting obvious ideas such as 'delivering e-mail to a wireless device'?"
Couldn't people flood the patent office with simple ideas
Isn't this the very reason why patent application costs money and time? So that the inventors will think twice before wasting the office's time.
And if we can lobby congressmen to wave the charges, we might as well lobby for no patent at all, this way all patents will be public patent.
Please stop entering code 2,2,7,6,6,4
It sounds like a nice solution, unfortunately it is not. It would require two mayor changes:
I'm not a friend of patents, but I see that they have their place. Making them free is an attempt to fight a symptom (patenting trivial things) by being faster and patent any possible trivial thing first so no idiot can use a stupid patent to blackmail everybody. But the real problem is the lack of quality in the review process and the dependency of the patent office on the registration fees (see above).
So I suggest to:memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
I also pondered this before. Sadly, I just don't believe there is any way in hell it will ever happen.
...
This is called defensive publication. If you want to make sure that nobody patents a particular invention, get the invention published in a scientific journal.
Wouldn't it be easier to prominently publish a book or something similar with all those ideas? Then you could point to provable prior art if a company tries to sue based on one of them.
ResidntGeek
IANAL, but my understanding is that if something's been published, it can't be patented. I read once (on /., so take it with a grain of salt) that sometimes a company will publish an invention when they don't want to go to the trouble and expense of patenting it, but don't want anybody else to patent it either.
I'm not sure what's considered "publishing" in this context. Maybe releasing an open-source program would be sufficient, or possibly you'd need to make a Usenet post, or send it to the JACM or something.
http://www.osdl.org/about_osdl/legal/patent_common s/
Yeah the sheer volume of meaningless patents is already huge. What I would suggest is perhaps somewhat along the lines of the original concept but deals well with the volume issues:
1) Provide an open database for public disclosure. This database would be a repository for prior art claims. So what you would do is, if you had a good idea, you'd drop it into the database and it would be kept there. Then when a patent came up, it would be readily searchable and if your idea was relevant and prior to their invention, it'd prevent them from getting the patent.
2) Seriously improve the patent review process. That means upping fees, hiring more patent clerks, and increasing the difficulty of getting a patent in the first place. It's time we stop pretending that patents are the realm of the lone inventor and recognize that they are weapons in corporate IP arsenals. As such make them very expensive to get and maintain and make the vetting process quite vigorous.
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I don't think we need "public patents". All that we need is a way to make sure that these ideas make it into whatever database the patent office use to search for prior art. Surely that's much easier to do than creating a whole new category of patents?
Of course, if the patent office actually did it's job diligently, even that wouldn't be necessary. All you need to do is publish the result.
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
So that the inventors will think twice before wasting the office's time.
Look at it this way: We have two choices. Either the "public domain" inventor pool that would flood the patent system if public domain patents existed can waste the patent office's time with unnecessary applications; or the "intellectual property" lawyer pool that floods the patent system at present can waste the public's time with unnecessary patent lawsuits.
Considering the patent office is, technically, employed by the public, I consider the former option preferable to the latter.
if you had RTFA you would have... oh wait....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Everyone knows that prior art defeats patents. If you are the first person to develop an idea, and you publish your work immediately, then you are immune from a subsequent patent. This does not cost anything.
Where open source/Free software runs into trouble is when they are replicating the work of others, such as GIF, MPEG4 etc. To a lesser extent, there are very broad patents, such as some online shopping patents, and UI patents. The broader a patent is, the easier it should be to find prior art. Again, if you publish your work (and CVS, etc would count) then you have nothing to worry about.
Anyway, if you intend to share the patent with the world, there is no need to apply for a patent then "free" it... just make the information available to the public, and it should have the same effect.
This is a test, please disregard.
I think you could make an interesting court case on the premise that patents are a *constitutional* right, at least in the US and therefore there should be no charge. What other constitutional rights does an individual have that he/she has to pay to exercise?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Im sure one can submit a patent and release it under public domain
back in the day we didnt have no old school
The whole purpose of a patent is to grant a limited time monopoly for the patent holder. Since this would be of no interest to one inventing for the public good, all that person need do is publish everything he or she has. As always, see (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_publicatio n for more, but really all you would need to do is lay all the details of your invention out on a web page. No one else will be able to patent that material because your published work would be "prior art" against it.
If you are the first person to develop an idea, and you publish your work immediately, then you are immune from a subsequent patent.
No you're not. You just stand a good chance of winning the court fight, provided you can afford to defend the lawsuit by the patent holder and it doesn't bankrupt you.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Which would cost...there's that ugly word again...money.
True, $0 < cost of publication, but cost of publication < cost of patent.
A brief response:
... you're looking at it, it's regularly and extensively used by patent researchers and not just to look at dilbert cartoons. There are literally millions of patent documents, then there are research papers and other notable journals, reference books, proceedings, ... It's not a lack of recording that's the problem it's one of economics. The patent has to be processed, there's not alot of time to do it in because time is money and taxpayers don't want to shut hospitals to pay patent examiners.
... Europe I think will set you back about £20k, the US and ARIP0, OAPI, China and the Far and Middle East??
1) there's an open database already
2) it costs about £5000 to get a patent in the UK (IIRC) including about £200 of fees and the rest drafting and patent attorney costs. You then have to pay yearly increasing fees. That's just for the UK
Patents have been weapons since their inception, they are aggressive methods to maintain a monopoly.
Everything is obvious and non-patentable. In retrospect.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
The notional proponent of the art, the position of whom is addressed in patent inventiveness/novelty decisions, is taken to be aware of all prior worldwide _publications_ (and not just paper ones, audio, video, scratched tree bark, ...). A defense of inventiveness can be mounted for obscure publications (I won't go into that).
... I used to be a UK Patent Examiner ... how did you guess??
There are several services that offer defensive publication.
One such route would be to file a patent _application_ and have it published. It then falls squarely within the gamut of documents regularly searched by patent examiners.
The stages of an application up to publication require fees of about £130 (sterling). This compares favourably with facilities like www.researchdisclosures.com (which I occassionally cited for patent searches) which charges £75 *per page*!!
This is not the hard bit at all.
The hard part is legally challenging a mega-corp with a prior publication of their "invention". Public money would never be able to meet the costs.
Yes
Probably true (I have no numbers to say either way). But it is undeniable that there are plenty of people who will gladly sacrifice hundreds or thousands of hours of their time to get an open source project under way. Ironic.
My guess is that most OSS developers do it for fun rather than altruism or personal beliefs -- and fun isn't fungible.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
These registrations used to be used by government researchers, back when all publicly-funded research used to enter the public domain.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
It is actually much easier to get a patent accepted than a paper published in a scientific journal.
Isn't that what Public Domain is? You could just start a website that documents diffrent ideas in patent form. Seeing as you can not patent previous art, no one would be able to patent the idea. This also prevents people from revoking the privlages/rights of the patent.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Only ideas that people pay for to be protected go into the database. The database does not contain ideas that someone comes up with but doesn't care for protection. Therefore someone can patent something others have been using previously without feeling the need for protection and the database will have no prior record of it.
With that simple change, couldn't people could flood the patent office with simple ideas and prevent abusers from patenting obvious ideas such as 'delivering e-mail to a wireless device'?
Am I the only one who sees something wrong with the start of that sentence?
The word you're looking for is "waive" not "wave".
I happen to know the IP.com gang (used to be one myself) and can tell you that there is more to making sure the stuff is available than just slapping it on a server somewhere. Documents published with them get digital notarizations (to allow you to prove times of availability) are made searchable, documents are collected in such a way to allow the collection of metadata (as many companies have rigid publishing formats for patents, but not disclosures) to help searchability. In addition the data is made available to patent offices, and they publish a printed journal containing the disclosure info (and optionally the full disclosure).
Do you have to go to these lengths to do something yourself? No. Does it increase the chances that your disclosure will be seen by a patent examiner. Yes.
Do people really think patent examiners have the time to go wading through every obscure website to find non-patent prior art? The fact that companies like IP.com and Research Disclosure (another defensive publishing company) have consolodated, high value collections makes them worthwhile to search. In addition, the inclusion of high-profile disclosures (like those from companies like IBM) makes these sources far more attractive to a patent examiner than Joe Nobody's blog that might have a good idea mixed in with pages of what he had for dinner last night, and why he thinks the Star Wars Empire would beat Star Trek's Federation in a fight.
--
So while it isn't free - it is reasonable for the amount of work that is involved. Interestingly, years ago, IP.com did offer a free publishing service (in conjunction with the Foresight Institute) which allowed free publications for inventions in the software and nanotechnology areas (paid for by grants) but it was completely ignored and eventually dropped. The original story was covered on Salon and commented here on
A lot of people just dislike the patent process so much, but seem to want to complain about it rather than explore the actual alternatives.
One of the problems with patents is they exist.
The system is screwed up, it was never designed for the kind of abuse the technological revolution has brought forth. We either need dramatic reform of the patent system, or just abolish it entirely. Patents are being used as strategic weapons against competition, hindering progress. The recent case vs RIM concerning their email system is a perfect example of bad patents. Its sole use was to slam a competitor by threatening to cripple the entire customer base including some high officials. The company that owns it doesn't even use it. We have patent holding companies whose only purpose is to sit on a patent portfolio until someone pays for a license, or someone's ripe for a lawsuit. They serve no other purpose. They're IP pimps.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
This is a test, please disregard.
More like no one can publish it now that you have it posted it, you cruel person you! If this is prior art, give me latter art.
I hate to say this, but there is another option that should be mentioned: violence, or the threat of it. As bad as this sounds, some people imposing patents have acutally done worse.
Sometimes a few credible threats can do a lot more to hold back the patent dogs than years of litigation and petitioning.
Considering that some patents have held back medical innovation and have led to deaths, or safety devices that have also led to death. Or considering how pharmacuticals sued African nations to keep them from making generics and that led to countless AIDS deaths. Or the countless other small innovative companies that were sued out of esxistence, and all the families and related people who suffered greatly from that. It is not an out of the question option.
essay: A Violent Protest Against Patents
I'm probably wrong here, but, as with trademarks don't you have to take out a patent for your idea in every country in which you're intending to use the idea?
I think it unlikely that the US government will pony-up US tax dollars to register an "Open Source" patent in the EU.
You're muddling the distinction between data that can be found "out there" in the sources that patent investigators can turn to and the databases maintained by the patent offices.
It's funny, the reason to patent someting is pretty much the exact opposite of what you people want to use it for. Patents are for when a person or company spends their time and/or money to design and build something that has NEVER been made before, that they keep their IP, so that some one else doesn't profit from their work. All of the stuff you OSS guys are talking about, shareing knowleage and everything, is the exact opposite. I hate to say this but some of you guys sound like a bunch of hippies, and that doesn't do any good for anyone. If your really worried about what you are working on and want it to becme public domain very cheaply, stick a copy of everythig into an envelope and mail it to your self, that way if a company tries to claim if for their own sue them and pull out the postmarked envelope as evidence and bam, thats all the proof any judge will need. OSS is great but it will never be main stream, it will always be on the fringes of it, when you can make a piece of software that even an 80 year old grandmother that can only types with 2 fingers, then maybe you have a chance, but you still need good marketing. Then again OSS people don't really want everyone to use the same software as them, but who would want to use the same software as your grand mother?
Just send me $5,000 so I can write it for you. Maybe I'll knock the price down to $4,000 for public patents.
But it won't cost you a cent to file it. You'll save $500!.
Sincerely,
Sharkb8
registered patent agent.
no, really.
The patent examiner would have to be made aware of said prior art on teh intarweb. If he/she never saw it (quite likely), then what?? A patent could be issued, then later on someone would have to challenge it. Back to expense, lawyers, hassle, etc.
I actually met with several people from the patent office last week. They were visiting companies in Nevada to learn how patents effect our business. First thing I want to say is that they weren't a bunch of idiots and they took their job seriously.
Anyways, we discussed the idea of public patents, and there's a simple solution already. You don't have to patent anything to make it public. You just have to publish it. That's all. If you have something that could be patentable and you want to make sure that it's free for public use, just write up a whitepaper, date it, and make it available publicly on the web. Make sure it gets into the WayBack machine. They use these resources when researching patents, so it should prevent them getting granted. If not, it would still function as prior art.
Cheers.
Since a patent is invalid if prior art exists, how would this "public patent" concept be better than simply publishing the idea so it becomes prior art?
All it would take would be a cheap/free way of timestamping the idea as to establish it as being prior to any patent appearing thereafter.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Which means you'll usually never see someone patent an idea just so that it can be public domain.
That's what publishing is for (in some magazine, journal, whatever). If someone tries to patent the idea later on, it should be easy to prove that the idea was not original and prior art exists.
It's the concept of genus and species. The original idea, the delayed toaster would be genus. A patent would have been possible. However, you could come along with a specific implementation, your species, that you could also patent, since improvements are patentable.
Examples: optical disk patent and a CD patent, microchip patent and an x86 patent, DNA coding and PCR DNA coding.
The fun comes in that one person may have the broad protection, but another has protected the truely useful implementation. Unless they cooperate, they are both hosed.
I draw the line at nuclear weapons.
Oh, was that a rhetorical questions? My bad.
I think that the entire idea of patents is to protect ideas, so I would reverse this.
I think there are a very few cases where the disclosure of an otherwise secret algorithm advanced the state of the art. IMHO, the RSA algorithm and the spreadsheet user interface were patent-worthy ideas.
However, I would add a few more restrictions on patents:
These measures will not solve all the problems with patents, but they should help.
Patents were invented so that the simple man, inventing something complex had time to create a company around it and produce enough products to give him a real tactical advantage against big corporations that have a lot of production capacity standing ready and so that he would actually benefit from his invention. Also, it served to make sure that all ideas were public 20 years after conception so that no true invention would be lost. Consider what would've happened if Einstein didn't publish stuff but just keep it to himself, or if Lempel and Ziv never considered telling others about compression. You'd have a lot of pointless repeated research.
Currently patents are being used for patenting the obvious. When you have an idea nowadays, you have to make a proof-of-concept before you can publish it (since it might not work - guys with patents on infinite compression, please do comply with this rule too...). In software in particular, your proof of concept is 80% of the work needing to be done and the sole thing that you have that others don't. You won't get a marketing position that's better than theirs, you won't be able to get any products on the shelf since both the products and the shelf are virtual. There is nothing to be gained by patents except for a very small gain on behalf of the company producing it.
However, if something is obvious and you patent it, you stifle inventions made by others that actually are with some content. Around 5 years ago I've seen a small article illustrating how to make a webshop in a few hundred lines of code. They also illustrate that you'd have broken about 40 software patents in those 300 lines, all the while not seeing those patents or actually stealing their ideas. If all those patents were enforced, you wouldn't be able to make such a webshop until about 2012. Just consider what would happen if something like that happens.
Shut down the USPTO software department and disallow any patent claiming a method for processing.
A patent = a legal right to exclude others from using a technology.
What then is a "public patent"? A legal right to exclude no one from using a technology?
1) Provide an open database for public disclosure. This database would be a repository for prior art claims. So what you would do is, if you had a good idea, you'd drop it into the database and it would be kept there. Then when a patent came up, it would be readily searchable and if your idea was relevant and prior to their invention, it'd prevent them from getting the patent.
Yeah, but no, but...
That makes the ASSUMPTION that said idea was unoriginal. If 2 people come up with very similar, yet not obvious inventions, if one person wants to patent, he should be able to. Not all inventions are "unique", especially for common problems. Prior art isn't just about whether or not the invention or analog was previously around, it is about whether or not the invention or an analog had already been in use.
I am sure that a lot of people had the idea for a portable, solid state MP3 player, but that doesn't make it any less patentable. The entity that decided that it was a good enough idea to warrant a patent and did that. Based on your idea, I can come up with an idea, put it in this database, and prevent someone else for patenting it. Now, when you come along with this great invention, you can't get a patent, and then InoTech can take your idea and make it for themselves.
Or, you would be able to patent it and be able to license or sell the invetion to InoTech and make use of your invention. Just because some people abuse the patent system doesn't invalidate them, and just because somebody else had the idea at the same time doesn't make any less patentable.
raise the bar for inventions. No software patents, no business patents. You can patent an implementation, but not an idea. In case of doubt, say no. The applicant has to prove that his invention is patent worthy (yes, this will harm small inventors)
I don't know about raising the bar but with regards to software and business method patents, I strongly agree with the above, they shouldn't be allowed. I'd also add life, er the process of patenting life, genes, or the insertion of genes into a life form that doesn't have it. Look at all the companies and organizations that are patenting genes in the human genome. This shouldn't be allowed, they didn't create those genes, they shouldn't get a patent for them. Now if they come up with a unique method or process to say correct a defect in a gene then they should get a patent for that, but not for the gene itself.
give the patent office more money. And if they fuck up and register something that was covered by prior art or is just current state of the art, fire them. Let them feel the pain and they will learn.
Here I disagree, er maybe agree? The fee for filing a patent should cover the cost of having a patent granted but no more. Now how much that is I don't know but whatever it is the fee should cover it. The costs of running the patent office should be covered by the fees.
FalconShould there be a Law?
My question is: What if somebody comes up with a simple device and does not patent it, but just gives it away? I believe that this is an example of such actions. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-308519180 989677405 [google.com] Is this still open to be patented by someone else? What happens if you just don't patent things and give them away? I'm also curious how Creative Commons licenses play into all of this?
If you or anyone else comes up with something but doesn't patent though publizies it and later someone else patents or tries to patent the same thing then your item can be used as prior art. Now if you didn't let anyone else know then it does no good. As for Creative Commons Licenses, here's Wiki's page on creative commons copyrights.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The intent of the patent process was to provide a quid pro quo for invention. That is, if you created something new, you would be given a temporary monopoly on the invention. In exchange you make concise instructions available that allow other people to replicate your invention after the patent expires. This quid pro quo establishes a financial incentive to invent under the premise that there's a certain amount of expense in invention.
So to get back to the notion of the solid state MP3 player. Let's say several people come up with the idea at the same time. Why should somebody get rewarded for making a patent on it when the idea was not uniquely there's? Just because they bothered to spend some money, they should suddenly have monpoly power over the invention for years to come? They didn't go through any effort to actually invent anything, merely the effort to pay lawyers to patent it.
Now I would be okay with patenting a specific implementation of a solid state MP3 player. If you invest some time researching and developing some particular interface that makes them very power efficient, etc, then I see nothing wrong with getting a patent on that feature. I see nothing wrong with patenting a compression algorithm either because there's a certain amount of research and effort that goes into that development. But I see no reason that the overall concept of a solid state mp3 player should be patentable.
The point of patents is to foster innovation to benefit society as a whole. Does providing a patent on the general concept of a solid state mp3 player benefit innovation? No. It makes money for the guy who patented it sure, but it actually retards development by requiring potential manufacturers to invest in licenses before they can produce a product.
The problem we have right now is that there's a lot of patents out there on very obvious concepts. The one-click patent is an obvious indication of a broken system. This is so ridiculously obvious that it wouldn't occurr to most people that it would even be patentable. What did Amazon have to do to figure out one-click short of paying a lawyer to register the patent? Nothing. So why should they get some sort of monopoly on the concept?
So if 2 people come up with something non-obvious and one chooses to go public with it and put it in the database I see no reason that the other person should get a patent on it. I see this system as a way to protect somebody who's developing a product without the expense of patents. If I, as an individual think of some new way to do something but have no interest in a patent, it would be good for me to have a way to protect myself from people that might otherwise come up with the idea and try to patent it themselves.
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You don't have to patent something for it to become part of the public domain. Just publish your ideas anywhere, and they become part of the prior art pool. You need to learn a lot more about the patent system before you start suggesting policy changes. You're like a blind surgeon.
The system is screwed up, it was never designed for the kind of abuse the technological revolution has brought forth. We either need dramatic reform of the patent system, or just abolish it entirely. Patents are being used as strategic weapons against competition, hindering progress. The recent case vs RIM concerning their email system is a perfect example of bad patents. Its sole use was to slam a competitor by threatening to cripple the entire customer base including some high officials. The company that owns it doesn't even use it. We have patent holding companies whose only purpose is to sit on a patent portfolio until someone pays for a license, or someone's ripe for a lawsuit. They serve no other purpose. They're IP pimps.
In the USA patents, and copyrights, are there to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. Article I - The Legislative Branch, Section 8 - Powers of Congress is very clear on this, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;". The problem with the patent system is that companies like RIM is being given a patent but not releasing a product based on it. Instead they just sat on the patent until Blackberry came along. Because RIM didn't release anything and didn't progress science, their patent should of been declared invalid. Fix that by making sure patents do what they are supposed to do then there won't be a problem with patents.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Steam technology would defeat your idea. Better idea: actually copyright it (costs $30) or have a public notary notarize all the pieces of paper with your idea on it. Then you can take *him* (or her) into court with you.
My book, podcast
I'd much rather have a free-for-all without patents. Nowadays developing a new product is like running naked through a minefield. Screw that, let the customers choose the winner, as it should be.
You know, Thomas Jefferson thought the same but his friend James Madison talked to him about it after which he came to believe issuing patents to inventors, and copyrights to writers and artists, would do more to advance the arts and sciences. Afterwards TJ using actuary tables decided patents and copyrights should be for 14 years with one 14 year extension possible for a total of 28. This way a person would have an incentive to continue creating. He eventually got some patents himself. Quite simply most people need the incentive a patent gives them to create. Why should normal person especially one who has to feed their family, excluding open sauce, er source, people, spend the tyme to create if someone else can take their work for themselves? Patents give the individual the opportunity to profit by their endeavors. That's how it should be! Now in this day of the internet, next day delivery, and how fast things progress I'd shorten patents to only say 5 or 7 years. And like I said earlier neither business methods nor software should patented.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Ever hear of jury duty, taxes, voting, military service, campaign volunteers, community service, bearing arms, eternal vigilance?
Your freedom is not free. You may not have to open your wallet specifically to open your mouth or change religions. But you pay for all your rights in various ways and all the time.
TANSTAAFL.