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Public Patents?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the non-profit-idea-proliferation dept.

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'?"

4 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Defensive publication by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. There is no need by Patentmat · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  3. SIR: Statutory Invention Registration by ewhac · · Score: 5, Informative
    SIRs are a sort of un-patent, also issued by the USPTO. This more or less officially registers your invention into the corpus of prior art, giving it a far better chance of being found by patent examiners. However, it grants you no rights of action against "infringers".

    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
  4. Not needed -- already free by localman · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.