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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'?"

3 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. The fragility of patents by blibbler · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  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