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'?"

Comments

Defensive publication

[tepples]

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.

SIR: Statutory Invention Registration

[ewhac]

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