Slashdot Mirror
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?
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