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

Isn't the OSDL already working on this issue?

[GrigorPDX]

http://www.osdl.org/about_osdl/legal/patent_common s/

Re:Defensive pub ... not limited to journals

[pbhj]

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).

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 ... I used to be a UK Patent Examiner ... how did you guess??