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A Simple Plan To Defeat Dumb Patents
Steve Jones writes "With the EU being rumored to look at software patents again I thought I'd have a look at the root of the problem — the US Patent Office — and work out if there is a simple way to defeat dumb patents. The big thing that defeats a patent is prior art. At the Patent Office they have the definition of Prior Art that includes the phrase: 'known or used by others in this country, or was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country.' Now suppose that every time we have an idea that we think is 'obvious' but that hasn't been done before, or something we think would be interesting but don't have the money to create — that we blogged about that idea, tagging it as 'prior art' via Technorati. This would give people an RSS feed of prior art." Read on for more details of Steve's proposal.
My argument is that by doing this we can, rightly, claim that the ideas have been described in the 21st-century version of a printed publication. Even if that is challenged, it is undeniable that by using the RSS feed it can be proven that people in a given country could have "known" about it.
I'm fed up thinking "Bloody hell I did that ten years ago," or "I thought about doing that, its a bit obvious" — when companies with as little intention as I had in developing the idea start putting the squeeze on businesses and developers. What I've always lacked is the visible proof to submit against a claim. This is a simple suggestion about using the power of the Web to create a massive prior art database. IANAL, but could it be this simple?
My argument is that by doing this we can, rightly, claim that the ideas have been described in the 21st-century version of a printed publication. Even if that is challenged, it is undeniable that by using the RSS feed it can be proven that people in a given country could have "known" about it.
I'm fed up thinking "Bloody hell I did that ten years ago," or "I thought about doing that, its a bit obvious" — when companies with as little intention as I had in developing the idea start putting the squeeze on businesses and developers. What I've always lacked is the visible proof to submit against a claim. This is a simple suggestion about using the power of the Web to create a massive prior art database. IANAL, but could it be this simple?
Personally, I don't think we can record all the blindingly obvious stuff we think of, mainly because it's blindingly obvious. Or very often, we can think of salient prior art that would probably invalidate any patent claims, so we assume it's not worth mentioning.
I would rather see the patent process made a little more transparent: any patent application has to go through 90 days on a public wiki or discussion board, where we could view applications and immediately reference prior art. This might simplify the job of the patent reviewers, who cannot possibly know the history of entire industries. They could simply check out the claims of prior art (which themselves could be ranked by visitors for validity -- "oh ya, I remember THAT") and immediately see that, duh, one-click purchasing is a really dumb idea.
Why would anyone participate? First, it's in our nature. You might have heard of Slashdot, where people with varying kinds of brain matter make varying kinds of comments about varying kinds of "news." But second and more importantly, it would be protection. If you work in a business that would be affected by a one-click patent, you have incentive to make sure nobody can charge you for it, or sue you for using it, if it isn't really an original idea.
Today's patent process in the U.S. is slightly public, I know, but how about making it totally Web 2.0 and buzzword-compliant?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Whenever a patent is classified as "dumb patent" and the jury has decided that you went to the court with a "dumb reason", you will be requested to pay X times the amount requested to the court and the person/company you sued for wasting everybody's time. You would be put also on a probation period during which suing for "dumb reasons" would increase the X for each time you bother the court with invalid/stupid reasons.
... Economics is based on incentive, people react to incentives and the courts are already enough busy to deal with these complaints.
Would work also for RIAA abuse.
Now that would save alot of time and money
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
The problem isn't just the "dumb" patents, but it's the notion of a patent in the first place which is wrong. We should be working to eliminate all patents. No patent has ever spurred innovation; many have severely held it back. Some pharma patents are indirectly responsible for people dying.
The problem with your idea is that it helps the patent examiner, thereby reducing the ratio of dumb:smart patents. This lowers the cost of obtaining a patent. What we need is some sort of hash: if you have an "obvious" idea, you publish in such a way that it cannot be searched for easily until the patent has been granted (i.e. publish, but don't index) - thus the patent can be overthrown easily, but the patent office remains overwhelmed, inefficient, and expensive.
A simple solution would be to require all patents to be made public in full for a period (say 6 months) prior to acceptance, this would allow any interested parties to object to them *before* they are enforceable. Obviously there are a lot of patents applied for on an annual basis, - so to simplify this it may be possible to have patents categorised into areas in which they apply, with penalties for having a patent that does not in fact cover all the areas claimed, but also making clear that if an area is not included in the patent it is not applicable in that area. I cant see anyone who actually innovates and patents new ideas to have a problem with this as it should work quite well, moreover it would be in large companies interests to challenge patents that affect them, thereby helping everyone.
(IANAL so I have no idea if all or any of this is already the case)
>>You might have heard of Slashdot, where people with varying kinds of brain matter make varying kinds of comments about varying kinds of "news."
Where everybody thinks they are legal expert AND a quantum physicist, and where there is a lot of noise to filter out. And where many people think that a fair number of the moderations are wrong (or even absurd) and think the moderation system itself kinda sucks (how 'bout only giving one negative mod point, for example.)
I think the idea does have merit, but various wikis could become trashed, especially if the posters have an agenda. Or if there are enough people totally against patents to begin with, they could repeatedly try to trash the whole system.
I've got schematics for a voxel display apparatus that I'm not sure if I'll patent or publish a description of. The summary points out the "printed publication" bit, which makes me realize that just publishing the specs online won't prevent someone else from taking my idea and patenting it.
Which gives me another idea...What if a "printed publication" was devised with limited printed circulation and extensive online publication. The whole idea would be to make ideas unpatentable via publication. Folks could submit illustrations, and these would be passed on more or less verbatim into the publication.
It would be a fun project, at the very least.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Also, the penalties should consider the wealth and size of the entity being penalized. Charging a startup company $100,000 may bankrupt it, charging a behemoth Microsoft $100,000 is a cost of doing business.
In many cases, there is never a problem finding prior art. Most software patents would never survive in court. The problem is that no company, working in their rational self-interest, would take the time, expense, and risk of a court case. It's cheaper to either take a settlement or fire back with their own patent warchest (resulting in stalemate).
Not a typewriter
There are several web sites out there that do nothing but publish your ideas (like these guys) so that they can be recorded as prior art. The stupid part is that they charge a very high fee. There needs to be a free site that is add-sponsored and community supported. In fact, if no one else does it, I'll do one. I already have my own dumb idea blog for this purpose. If a few of you respond to this post, suggesting that I actually provide this free service (and maybe some nice ideas about what web host, what CRM software, what to do to get paid adds, etc), I'll go ahead and do it. If any of you would rather do this yourself, please say so. I'd like to be an early user.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
As I understand it, what matters is *published* prior art. You can get a patent invalidated if there was prior art that the patent office missed - but not just because somebody was already using the same invention in secret.
However, you may not want the examiner to be able to see all prior art. As Don Marti pointed out, that would just allow patent troll companies to design more cleverly worded patents that get around the prior art but are still able to cause damage - and indeed are more difficult to invalidate. Better to publish in a way that can be proven in court later, but not in a way that makes it easy for patent trolls and the patent office (who both have a vested interest in granting, not rejecting patents) to use it.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
- Singular-value decomposition
- SVD
- Spectral decomposition
- Principal component analysis
- PCA
- Eigen analysis
- eigenimage analysis
- Karhunen-Loeve transform
- KL transform
This is further complicated by the fact that inventors are not always up on the literature and may not know the proper names for things.This isn't an insurmountable problem, but it's a big one even when searching among existing U.S. patents.
The patent system is just some arbitrary way of encouraging innovation. The US system is obviously failing, as the costs of maintaining the system outweigh the benefits it imparts on our society.
Other countries have different ways of encouraging innovation, and in the long term, their economies may dwarf ours due to our failing system.
All property rights, be they Intellectual or Physical property, exist to encourage investment. No one "naturally" owns anything, though many people have been brainwashed into thinking that is the case.
I don't know which way is best. It seems the Stalinist system doesn't work well, and the US system has some SERIOUS problems which require periodic correction (trust-busting and such).
My advice: Watch the world economies, and don't be afraid to immigrate if you see one system collapsing and another rising. Of course, you should avoid contributing to economies in countries which deny fundamental human rights (China, Iran, etc.) but don't let nationalism blind you to economic realities.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
It would take a lot of time, effort, and money to make the website something worthwhile.
Eh, A talented web developer could setup a useful site in a weekend or two. To make it good would take a few months longer. It's not like we're talking about something extraordinarily complex here, just a site to post ideas that has a few fields to enter keywords, categories, and free text. Then make it searchable.
It wouldn't take any money to speak of, and it's even in the best interest of software developers, so there's motivation to do so. Hell, it's even in the best interests of large software companies as it takes some burden off them for obvious software patents. The only people it's NOT in the best interest of is scumbag IP companies who don't produce anything but lawyers who sue other companies who actually DO produce things.
AccountKiller
Or, how about something completely free and hosted/backed up by big companies? Say, for example, usenet.
alt.patent.reform.bork.bork.bork
or, more seriously
misc.int-property
alt.inventors
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
I won't disclose how long ago I thought of this, but in the many years since I have not ever seen it done anywhere. So either it's a new idea, or it really doesn't work, or I just haven't looked around enough.
My idea is a simple syncronous motor without a controller that will run at double speed (6000 RPM at 50 Hz, 7200 RPM at 60 Hz). The idea is to construct the stator with 3-phase windings just like a normal syncronous motor. However, for the rotor, replace the permanent magnets with 3-phase windings powered by AC current coupled to the rotor through 4 slip rings. Wire the rotor windings so the rotating magnetic field turns in the opposite direction of the intended rotation and the stator field rotation. For proper startup, use 12 distinct windings organized as 6 pairs at opposite sides. Half of the windings will be wired to line-to-neutral power connections and the other half will be wired for 1.732 times the voltage and wired to line-to-line power connections. This should give a reasonably uniform magnetic field.
Now, how do I get this tagged?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The burden is SUPPOSED to be on the applicant to determine prior art. However, applicants often ignore prior art of don't look very hard to find it. USPO examiners don't have time to do much research themselves. What we need is a serious penalty for any applicant that ignores prior art in the application. If someone files a patent ignoring prior art then potential competitors should be able to sue under the Sherman Antitrust Act for trying to restrain trade. Anyone who tries to enforce a patent that is bogus should have a counter suit filed under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
>>Including every idea would be a necessity
I think too much spam and trolls would preclude it from ever being considered as "published" or have much respectability by the patent office. It could become just a bunch of male enhancement ads. It could also just become a huge adwords-type project where every search term returned a bunch of focused advertising.
I also used an example of a novel, which cannot be patented to begin with. Some people will confuse copyrights, patents, and trademarks. (I don't know if an idea for a novel can be patented, but I could see if this kind of database ever became a somewhat authoritative reference, then someone filling it up with ideas for novels then trying to sue anytime a similar idea is used in a bestseller.)