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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
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.
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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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.
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)
all of them....
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
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
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?
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
>>> "The database does not contain ideas that someone comes up with but doesn't care for protection."
... and the one big cheap database, the web. So yes "the database" used for patent searches (at least in UKPO and EPO) does have "free ideas" in.
e nt/windsurf.html
Except that many of the databases used have non-patent information in them. Back copies of computer magazines, IBM technical disclosure bulletins, journals of the IEE and IEEE, British Computer Society publications (to name but a few)
For the breadth of available prior art check out this synopsis of the famous "Windsurfer" case http://slcc.strath.ac.uk/scotslawcourse/ip/ip/pat
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 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.
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.
That's why rather than flooding the patent system with public patents, the patent challenge system should be opened so that bogus patents can be easily challenged by the public and the evidence they provide would be used as part of the challenge review process. Of course, this still requires more money and people for the patent office as mentioned in a previous post.