Slashdot Mirror
Tapping the Web's Collective Wisdom For Patents
BountyX sends in a CNN story offering an update on the US patent office's experiment in crowdsourcing, called Peer-to-Patent. (We've discussed this initiative a few times in the last couple of years.) In its first year the program has dealt with a minuscule fraction of patent applications, which numbered over 467,000 in 2007, up over 97% from a decade earlier. "The Patent Office reports that it has issued preliminary decisions on 40 of the 74 applications that have come through the program so far. Of those, six cited prior art submitted only through Peer-to-Patent, while another eight cited art found by both the examiner and peer reviewers... [I]n its second year, Peer-to-Patent is being expanded to include claims covering electronic commerce and so-called 'business methods' ..."
... If they plan on using the web's collective wisdom to prevent shitty patents I'm all for it, it would be wonderful to have people around the globe be able to keep the patent trolls at bay.
is about -42 Libraries of Congress.
(reply only with a more clever analogy)
They should patent that.
(I hope they pay well enough !)
Why not just stop accepting software patents instead ?
They are just insane.
Software is Speach!
Guess that might be an improvement over using carrier pigeons. Wonder if this will make the RIAA go postal?
Even if you work with a very narrow scope and manage to keep your work well hidden from the public, there's usually going to be some prior art if your work has any value at all. Good innovation, however, is driven by the limitations of current technology. As long as your work builds upon what's been done in a meaningful way, your ideas should be patentable. Usually, this happens in corporations and academia because they're the only ones that have been working in the field long enough to know the limits of current technology, but it can definitely happen with small time innovators as well if they read alot technical literature on a particular subject.
1- suck at your job
2- get someone more competent and involved to do it for free
3- profit !!
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
We're in New Zealand!
Congratulations!
Surely the benefit of capitalism to the public at large results from competition between those supplying goods or services. If a business can patent a business method, then there will be no competition in that particular area and if a company patents a sufficient number of methods, that business could exclude the competition completely.
Is anyone actually doing anything about this madhouse?
Now I'm sure there will be a bunch of people moaning that this is getting "us" doing "their" job for free. Well hell the time spent here on Slashdot having ago at the Patent office is already high enough so why not be constructive in using that time?
The only problem I see with this is that they haven't really invested in the tech side of crowd sourcing. How about a SETI style desktop app that just notifies you and lets you go "ooooh that one looks crap, I'm taking it down" rather than a build it and they will come approach. The key here is going to be getting more eyes on the problem which means pushing the patents out rather than just waiting for people to respond. Personally I'd be happy to have a list of patents in my specialised areas that I could dissect and destroy. Its almost worthy of a CV mention, not just the patents that you've been granted but the ones that you've prevented being granted.
Don't bitch and moan, this is a good use of the internet and crowd sourcing to get round a problem of dumb patent submissions from large corps. Yes its your time, but you'll just have to post one less time on Slashdot, and spend 5 minutes less reading comments on Digg.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Yeah... small time innovators who spent the first half of their career working for the big companies before they left with their one big idea to set up on their own as a... small time innovator.
...there's usually going to be some prior art if your work has any value at all...As long as your work builds upon what's been done in a meaningful way, your ideas should be patentable.
I'm sorry. You appear to be advocating the right to patent ideas which you were not the originator of. I find this objectionable. Your patents should only cover those precise parts which are novel. And even then only if they pass the conditions of originality and non-triviality.
I never really understood the business method patent thing.
can I build a copy of a patented item if I want?
Isn't it only illegal if I try to sell that item?
a company isn't selling it's business method.
So unless it's a consultancy firm which makes it's money restructuring other businesses...
Simple answer: The USPTO is begging for a lawsuit from large corporates.
Crowdsourcing has the potential to leak a company's "confidential" secrets, and hence a corporate will sue the government to overturn such a decision.
Obviously the USPTO has better ways to spend its limited grant, so they will default or withdraw this decision.
All good intentions can be undone with a lawsuit.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I patented this back in 1997.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
I never really understood the business method patent thing.
can I build a copy of a patented item if I want?
Isn't it only illegal if I try to sell that item?
a company isn't selling it's business method.
So unless it's a consultancy firm which makes it's money restructuring other businesses...
You can use a patent spec for research purposes or when you will not harm the financial benefit to the patent holder (IIRC). So you can't sell it, but also you can't benefit financially nor cause a financial detriment to the patent holder. So you can't give patented stuff away (without a license) as this potentially harms the patent holders income. If you're using a business method then you're gaining financially from it ... ergo ...
Business Method patents are a weird thing in a capitalist economy though.
Note that pure business methods (without technical elements) aren't supposed to be patentable in Europe.
The problem with patents is not so much that they are issued left right and center for just about any stupid claim. Its that is so expensive in terms of lawyers and most importantly *time* to challenge them. The courts seem to assume that a issued patent is by default valid where this is clearly not that case. At least not currently.
The second biggest problem is that "someone skilled in the art..." really means a Judge who is skilled in legalese.
The lawyers and patent attorneys are loving it.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Corporate and academia researchers get paid to write papers which then get cited elsewhere and which seems to be the measure of innovation. When was the last time you saw open source cited in a paper or article? Must not be that much innovation going on in open source.
You're misunderstanding what OP is saying. He's not advocating a right which doesn't exist. He's talking about patenting things. Everything you say follows.
I haven't seen the program, but if they intend to harness the "Wisdom of the Crowds", the signal-to-noise ratio is going to be a problem.
www.peertopatent.org
That is the link to sign up and become a reviewer.
dotank.nyls.edu
That's the code of conduct, which lists conduct rules, moderator privileges, and the information contributors are required to provide.
Apparently there is a voting system.
That's going to be an interesting thing to watch. They're relying on the bulk of contributors defining the most appropriate content, kind of like slashdot.
How well does that work anyways?
Make each patent applicant spend at least 10 hours each reviewing 10 other patents from other random applicants to check for prior art and to give opinions on 'obviousness'. They must complete their 100 hours of patent service before their patent can be granted.
the lawyers will always have the last say. i think amazon has proven a company is willing to thrash endlessly against the proverbial drawing board to come up with silly and lame-brained patents designed to thwart the broken system.
not to sound like a total downer, but if you can influence the peer group you can influence the outcome.
Good people go to bed earlier.
So if I profit(time saved by moving faster can be invested otherwise and so can lead to a profit) from my homebrew segway or other patented item then I've broken the law?
Wow, American patent law is utterly broken...
Given the level of understanding shown on this and other internet forums, I fear that the signal to noise ratio of such an initiative will be so poor that the whole thing will be a massive waste of time.
How many ill-informed and inappropriate "prior art" submissions do the internet masses need to make before patent reviewers just start ignoring them?
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
I'm sorry, but if you tap the web's collective wisdom on anything, the answer you get will be, "lol, you suck!"
Lies! New Zealand doesn't exist.
It doesn't exist? Great, I have just filed a patent application for it.
So if I profit(time saved by moving faster can be invested otherwise and so can lead to a profit) from my homebrew segway or other patented item then I've broken the law?
No, my explanation wasn't complete so as to avoid writing an essay that noone would read.
Wow, American patent law is utterly broken...
Yes.
Perhaps for traditional patent fields like machines and medicine it makes some sense to collaborate to increase the quality of patents. But in software, surely a better-quality software patent is just more of a threat and allows even more money to be extorted?
Why should people help to reduce the costs of doing business for patent trolls? If you have prior art, better to keep quiet about it and reveal it after the patent is granted to neutralize the patent - not before, so the lawyers can reword the patent to work around your prior art. Remember, the submitter of a patent is only interested in getting the strongest patent possible for himself, so it's a mistake to play the game assuming that all sides are altruistic and just want to improve the quality of the system as a whole.
Oh boo hoo hoo. The poor things. Of course people should volunteer their time to make sure those software patents are granted as swiftly as possible.
Business method patents truly suck, and anything which helps them to be granted more easily or legitimizes them is a bad thing.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Might you be able to give me a link to a better explanation?
The wiki didn't really explain why there's a difference between a profit you make from something you build yourself which makes your life easier or saves you time and the profit you make from using a buisness method which does the same thing.
So more than 467,000 patents were filed in 2007. Let's just call it 467,000 to simplify the math. 74 patents were submitted to the program. So that means that 1 out of every 6310 patents were submitted to this program. As I have said before, this whole program is a scam designed to convince the complainers that the patent office is "doing something" about the "patent problem".
b I used to work for the US government at one time and I can promise you all that they will never, never, never do anything to cut their funding and lowering the number of patents would cut their funding. They will instead set up bogus programs like this that will catch a few bad patents, which they will then hold up as examples that things are changing for the better. It's all smoke and mirrors.
Usually, this happens in corporations and academia because they're the only ones that have been working in the field long enough to know the limits of current technology, but it can definitely happen with small time innovators as well if they read alot technical literature on a particular subject.
Not always. In my chocolate factory, we had patented an idea; it must have been good, because as soon as the patent expired, everyone and their dog (in the chocolate world) began doing Just That.
It was small-time innovation at the time... now a few years back (but much later), we met a guy who was using the same idea in his products and he thanked us for the idea that had made him rich. Way richer than us, I can tell you...
But the idea was had without reading lots of technical stuff. All you need for having ideas is a working brain. There was even no machine for doing what we had invented at that time...
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Because you can't license the one object? Whereas you can make money suing into oblivion everyone who uses your business method (which is patentabl by law).
If that is right, then US patent law is recursively broken.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
In principle you're right. What you describe is how the concept behind patents is supposed to work.
In reality, there's only pharmaceutics where the patent system works for the patent-owners remotely like your description. Everywhere else, patents have become a tool for mercantile suppression and corporate warfare; from which the economy as whole only suffers (with the exception of lawyers).
Read http://researchoninnovation.org/dopatentswork/ and http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm on how the patent system really works (as opposed to theory).
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
One step of a patent application is called "publishing" and it is where the application is publicly published.
This is done so that any interested party can challenge the application.
Patents are a deal between the public and the inventor that basically grants a few years of monopoly privileges to the invention in exchange for disclosing it into the public domain.
A secret patent doesn't meet those goals.
there's usually going to be some prior art if your work has any value at all
And this one
As long as your work builds upon what's been done in a meaningful way
conflict with each other. I'm not a patent expert, but I usually take prior art to mean that your idea has been done before and that you new idea does not have meaningful improvements to the existing ideas. The difficult part of patent examination is determining what changes are meaningful enough to warrant a patent. As an example, if I take an old process and use it in a web page instead of on the command line, I wouldn't consider that a meaningful improvement. But it may seem meaningful to some people.
This is ancient news. I submitted a (rejected) story about this last year.
The government can't save you.
I'm not that /au fait/ with US law. But see "Roche Products v. Bolar Pharmaceutical" and 35 USC. You won't have broken the law (infringement is tortuous), but it does seem a bit more restrictive than I had understood and you apparently aren't allowed to make that homebrew segway except to perform genuine experiments. In actuality Segway aren't likely to sue you, they may not get costs and might invalidate their patent.
CPC Article 27(b);
UK Section 60(5), http://www.ipo.gov.uk/patent/p-decisionmaking/p-law/p-law-manual/p-law-manual-practice/p-law-manual-practice-patent1977.htm;
EPC Article 64 - which just says national law determines what is infringing, but European states generally have provisions like UK Patents Act S60(5)(a) which says "[use of an invention doesn't infringe if] it is done privately and for purposes which are not commercial;".
So it seems the US law is more restrictive and you were closer to being right than me.
I'd tap that! Oh wait. We're not at Fark. Yeah. -42 sounds about right.
Not everyone is sold on the concept of Peer-to-Patent. Stephen Key, an inventor in California who has patented everything from toys to container labels, worries that the program requires applicants to put their ideas out there on the Web for anyone to see -- and potentially steal.
Is he not aware that one already has to publish an idea in order to patent it? Or is he relying on the fact that fewer people read patent applications than web articles?
Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines Correct?
How long until Amazon's lawyers realize that this is a blatant infringement of the patents that underlie their Mechanical Turk system?
Failure to follow this advice may result in non-deterministic behavior.
One way to increase one's chances of creating clear, usable, patentable drawings is to consider using Punch! ViaCAD. I do. I love it. It's WAY cheaper than AutoCAD, tho it has a Mac-ish interface. But, once one spends some time getting used to the sparse interface, it's features, and staying on top of or involved with the forums, ViaCAD could be a GODSEND. For me, the graphics are much more soothing to my eye, and less cluttered than AutoCAD. AC for certain has thousands of features, but for many struggling, new entrepreneurs, AC is nothing less than an absolute overkill, comparing $98 vs ~$6,000. Even AC Lite, inventor and any Inventor Lite products won't be low enough in price for law-abiding entrepreneurs (people with very little money or next to NO money).
http://www.punchcad.com/products/viacad2d3dV6.htm
http://www.punchcad.com/full_store.html
Since my manual drafting skills are wanting and my handwriting is horrid, and ViaCAD runs fine in VirtualBox (in, sigh, vista) in my PCLinuxOS-based laptop, ViaCAD is a blessing for me, having paid $98 retail (at CompUSA, when they were still around), then only $15 for the upgrade and access to periodic patches. The ViaCAD product may be going away, being replaced by ViaCAD Pro, which used to cost over or around $500, which is being replaced by Shark. So, for the capabilities of ViaCAD and ViaCAD Pro (which I gather will price around $250-ish), it's hard to beat, if one is not looking for pure AutoCAD or cheap AC clones (which Autodesk *seems* to not be running out of business)
But, the main thing is, if you can IMAGINE it, use CAD, ANY CAD you can legally obtain, and design your work. Be novel, be neat, and try to use a 3-D printing shop if you can afford it. Beats going to a manufacture or representative of one that might force you to pay for expensive dies and molds for parts or parts of ideas that might never go into production.
Look around. Reenvision a product that has annoyed the hell out of you and left you with that feeling of "I can improve upon THAT". Sketch it on paper, measure it, think about it, then model it in 3D. I am someone who tries to model in 3D, using 2D as a base point. I don't like (generally) modeling non-simple things in 2D first. ViaCAD (or any decent 3D tool) will let a drafter start in 2D or 3D and extend/extrapolate the model iteratively to avoid matters of constant re-measuring.
Yeh, purists will say "LEARN 2D FIRST!", but some of us are simply, unabashedly wired to think in 3D and struggle or chafe being forced to do in 2D what modern tools permit in 3D (modeling, flattening, obtaining centers of gravity, weight/mass, materials information assignment, trimming, translating/moving, spinning/rotating) that are a ROYAL PITA in 2D-centric drafting.
As for your ideas, don't sit in a coffee shop where a sensitive idea you work on gets stolen from behind your back. Document your ideas. Share with NO ONE you don't trust. If you practice, in the open, do it on stuff of no consequence. Guard you backpack or laptop. If you cannot afford to patent, then BE SURE to consider visiting a Small Business Administration office, a SCORE advisor, industry trade shows, learning about non-disclosure agreements, intellectual property, and ALSO consider -- if all else fails -- publishing your ideas as prior art measures. Publish no only on the web (if you feel you cannot afford the risk of those late-night inventor informercials), but at a public place, in print, and distribute to put (voluntarily or involuntarily) others that YOUR idea might be of interest to them, but that YOU have copyright on it. For damages protection, register with the US Copyright Office/Library of Congress.
If you are a student, working on a project, consider affixing copyright notices on your drawings so your instructors and classmates cannot lay claim to your ORIGINAL work or your novel modifications. If it's a team project,
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
We don't need to grant idea-monopolies in order to ensure the emergence (and application) of new ideas.
Patents are an anachronism. They do more harm than good in the modern world.
This might become an interesting business model:
Be sure to keep copies of applications from the past. Get investors to fund the operation of:
-- buying legit copies of all known software, past, present and future (as released)
-- hire an army of average to excellent developers (experienced and unorthodox, but semi-productive)
-- get them to collectively and/or in groups use the library of tools...
for the purpose of demonstrating in patent cases that pre-existing software was capable of doing what is currently being litigated. It should not matter that no "prior art" was generated or publicized. That the software was able to easily or with "reasonable coaxing" produce work that is claimed as "novel" should matter. This would prevent inane issuance/awarding of patents that are just crazy, like patents for stamping the back of a photo in the cell phone, or, in the computer, or printer before printing.
Some philanthropic person with an axe to grind at some big companies could hire people to do this, systematically taking apart certain assholes-of-corporations that patent to obstruct with no real novel gain in what the product or function is doing. So, whereas some small-time inventor could be using procedures or code from an arcane piece of software and otherwise being unmolested in court, big-time companies and lawyers would rather pretend that prior art is necessarily PUBLISHED.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"