Slashdot Mirror
Crowdsourcing Site Offers Rewards To Bust Patents
holy_calamity writes "Article One Partners is a new startup that offers $50,000 rewards to people that find prior art for certain valuable patents. The company's founder told New Scientist she thought the initiative would improve 'patent quality' by increasing scrutiny on poor patents. She aims to profit by selling the information contributors collect, or trade stocks based on it. Current patents they are looking for help to bust include those being used by Konami to sue Harmonix over Rock Band and Guitar Hero."
Kind of like ambulance chasing, huh?
The patent will have to be revoked and beyond legal appeals to get the reward.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Why not go after patent trolls (there's prior art to his 'prior art'!) instead of companies who actually developed a product and patented it?
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
Its the Prior Art Generator. Its only fair. They have infinite computers to generate infinite patents, but now you can hit reload until you win that $50,000:
http://thesurrealist.co.uk/priorart.cgi
I've had access to millions of LOC over the years that I couldn't legally release as proof of prior art without getting corporate legal involved, and that's usually not a trivial undertaking.
I'm not sure $50k is worth potentially trashing a career.
There are hundreds if not thousands of companies out there that have written software in-house for decades, and I'm guessing most are in the same boat.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I suppose you're trying to say only prudes will be offended by that link. But a pixelated penis is a penis nonetheless. I don't want to explain to my coworkers why I've got one sitting on my desktop, complete with pubes.
Not safe for work. Period.
Stupid business model. Just tell her to make a Slashdot profile and post stories about stupid patents and there'll be a dozen posts about prior art within an hour, all for free. Why throw away $50k when free is better?...
The bigger they get, the fewer such patents there will be, the harder it will become for them to stay in business. Hardly a viable model...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There's a reason why it's patented, it's a completely original concept.
Not that Harmonix would understand that. Nearly every game they've made has either been a rip off of a Konami music game or developed FOR konami, save Anti-Grav.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Another organization: Peer-to-Patent (aka Community Patent Review)
Currently a pilot project, renewed once per year, as long as it's useful.
Because clearly, getting paid to write about penises on a non-work related website via a network where text is much easier to sniff than pixels is OK with the company.
Hang on. The Article One site doesn't say they offer $50,000 rewards. It says, "Earn up to $50,000 for sending in prior art which can invalidate patents." In other words, you could end up with peanuts. They also have a chart listing "profit sharing activities" that is so bewilderingly complex that it's meaningless.
I would hardly lump Konami in with the patent trolls.
If anything, Harmonix being able to rake in millions off of a complete rip-off of Konami's original ideas is a testament to why we need the patent system.
I drink your Tranya. I drink it up!
Harmonix made a wheelbarrow full of cash from those games. If they have patent issues they should be paying $50K of their own money.
To have something like this immediately focus on helping one commercial entity against another is politically naive.
well the patient they are using for musical rhythm matching is the 90's game of Simeon. since the patent was released in 2002 a game from the 90's = prior art.
For something to be considered prior art it must have been publicly available in some form. For example, a released product is prior art, a prototype or in-house product is not. A paper published in a journal is prior art, a internal whitepaper or lab notebook is not.
While the courts to accept internal schematics, code and documentation as evidence that a released product is implemented in a certain way and thus prior art for a certain patent, they would not consider a product that has never been released as prior art.
That is what the first-to-file rules changed - when multiple people apply for overlapping patents all the other internal documentation that is not considered prior art is now only looked at if it was created within a year before the patent was filed. In the past it was looked at much farther back to determine who invented a product first, but only in the case of multiple filers. Even before the change, it wasn't prior art, and thus couldn't invalidate a patent if the other party never filed for a patent.
Well, I think IBM should open up the Lotus SmartSuite patents list to review so that end users such as myself can feel more comfortable about sharing or trying to make money from database apps/interfaces we designed in Lotus Approach. Until Lotus/IBM update Lotus SmartSuite and make SmartSuite OS-agnostic, or at least allow external developers to help out, what will we have as regards competing suites.
IBM, look at SUN. They are going to axe 70,000 or so jobs in the next 10 or so months. What if they cut funding to OpenOffice.org? Will SmartSuite (!NNNNOT! jeez.. suddenly i cannot recall the name of the new suite IBM is working on...) be ready? The SmartSuite we S/S users all know and love?
Base STILL is not up to the task to enable me to retool my interfaces. It won't for 5 more years, given Sun's/OO.org's approach to things since 1999/2001. Only by exposing and then disposing the patents that make IBM to fearful or reticent to spin off an Open Source/OS agnostic version of Lotus SmartSuite will we have a competitor regain the glory the award-winning suite had in the early 90's. Google Office/Docs may seem foreboding, but SmartSuite can STILL regain contender status.
What of it, IBM? Sun's eclipsing is shining light on an opportunity for IBM or IBM/SUN to take SmartSuite off of life support. Expose those hindering patents. If the holders don't like it, TOUGH. Their silence or absenteeism are screwing up things for the rest of us. Let challenge-seeking developers help IBM design around those onerous patents.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I suppose you're trying to say only prudes will be offended by that link. But a pixelated penis is a penis nonetheless. I don't want to explain to my coworkers why I've got one sitting on my desktop, complete with pubes.
I've only one thing to say to you...
8==
The other day on NPR there was a bit about how the check cashing industry was actually helpful to poor people. Now maybe patent trolling isn't so bad? What next? Dogs and cats sleeping together?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares?"" You do realize that your sig is not correct, right? The phrase is "For all intents and purposes."
"I don't have to think. I only have to do it. The results are always perfect, but that's old news." - Meat Puppets
And on the LEFT side of the screen it says:
I call prior art for "up to $50,000 reward" stated on the right side of the page, on the base of the left side giving away clean "$50,000 reward" for the same act.
Who do I need to contact to receive my $50k?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
[Amplitude copied Beatmania] badly too.
You may have a point there. But Parappa the Rapper was released in Japan in December 1996, a year before Beatmania. Which Konami game did it copy? Likewise, Bust a Groove was out ten months before DDR 1st Mix.
Clearly the purpose of the sig is to point out that 'whom' is no longer a word in situations that have intensive purposes.
What about the Simon game? It's a "musical-rhythm matching game" with different colors for different sounds. Bam, where's my $50,000?
Am I the only one who misread that as 'crowdSURFING' ?
What a depressingly stupid machine.
It also does not beg the question. Therefore, I conclude that what the sig is actually about is trolling people who care about correct usage.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Like outsourcing patent examiners after the fact that the real patent examiners have failed to do their job and issued a patent for something that had prior art.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the patent examiner's job is to check for prior art. Scanning the entire patent library for prior art is a non-trivial task which cannot be automated or done properly in a hurry.
It's actually the responsibility of the person submitting the patent, and if they're wrong, they're vulnerable to expensive lawsuits from anyone who does hold prior art. The third possibility, however, is that prior art exists but isn't patented -- meaning the patent examiner wouldn't be able to find it in their library anyway. That means the patent submitter is not as likely to be charged with wrongdoing, but the patent will remain in force until someone takes the time to point it out.
I thought of an idea some time ago to get rid of obvious patents, like the (not-so) Amazing One-Click. It would mean less work for the PTO (Patent/Trademark Office), too. The case of prior art might be considered a special case of "obvious" (or known) patents. See what you think:
When someone submits a patent, claiming to have found (let's say) A Wondrous Way For Customers to Order What They Want By Clicking The Mouse Only Once, the PTO would publish the claim. Not the contents of the patent, simply the claim itself, the problem that the patent claims to solve. They would give the general public some set time, say 30 days, to come up with some way to solve this problem. "We have a patent application claiming to offer A Wondrous Way For Customers to Order What They Want By Clicking The Mouse Only Once. Can anyone come up with how this might be done? If someone gets a valid submission in within 30 days, then this patent will be considered obvious."
People who would be motivated to work hard to look for a solution within the allotted time would include, besides the Slashdot crowd, firms who have a vested interest NOT to pay licensing fees every time they want to use the invention. They would have some idea what sort of patent apps might be coming down the pipeline. PTO doesn't have to figure out whether a patent is obvious (which is good seeing as how they're doing a pretty lousy job of it). As for prior art, if the public can come up with a way to solve the desired problem using prior art, then that's another sign that the patent is obvious! Of course, these submissions tbhemselves of "that patent is so obvious even I could come up with something in 30 days" would be published and be available to the public.
Some patents, including algorithmic software patents, are worth patenting. The MP3 algorithm, for example, was the result of hard work and research. If the PTO had given the public a chance to come up with "A Way to Compress Sound Files With Unnoticeable Loss", people might not have been able to produce a solution in 30 days, showing that the MP3 patent is not so obvious. Someone might have come up with a different solution (Vorbis, FLAC, etc.), and that would be okay but the MP3 patent would be granted. (Of course, then large firms might have used Vorbis instead of paying the MP3 fees.)
What do you think?
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Dang all this time I thought it was "For All in Tents and Porpoises".
.
There is the second problem:
To contribute anything of value you have to read and understand the patent. What geek ever RTFA.
It will be easy to find something that bears a superficial resemblance to what you have read in an abstract or summary.
You need to keep in mind the imagination of the inventor. What seems easy and obvious in retrospect may not have seemed easy or obvious at the time.
The cotton gin is, after all, fundamentally nothing more than a comb - tech that could plausibly have been found buried with the pharaohs.
Participating in this project is not only useless, it's actually dangerous. Suppose you come across a pending patent that's similar to something you're working on. If you submit prior art, then that might invalidate the patent, but it might not. However, by submitting prior art you publically reveal the fact that you know about the patent. If that patent is granted, and you are later sued for violating it, it becomes "willful infringement", which means you owe triple damages. Because of the way patents are written and interpreted, you can never know for sure whether you're infringing a particular patent.
Because of this triple-damages risk, every company has its lawyers tell the engineers not to look at or look for patents. It will be exactly the same with this project: your employee agreement will state that you can't ever look at the patents that go through this project, because that creates an unacceptable risk.
And yes, that's really stupid, and defeats the original purpose of patents (which was to encourage people to publish their methods). It also means that you can't do anything to avoid infringing on patents, and turns invention into a legal minefield.
Shampoo invented these patents.
That Prior Art Generator isn't called Shampoo, is it?
As the Founder of Article One Partners, I am excited to see this level of interest in the company. I would like to respond to a few questions and clarify some of the excellent points made. 1. We select our Studies based on the economic value of patents to industry. Some of the patent owners are public companies and some are patent aggregators (in our launch Studies, 15% of the patent owners do not manufacture). I believe the use of the term "troller" hinders a better discussion about the real issue -- patent quality. This is our focus. 2. Our Advisors will be paid the Rewards stated within 60 days of an announcement of a Patent Study outcome. There is no holding period dependent upon court decision. Article One presents its opinion, only a court or the US Patent Office can render a decision about the validity of a patent. If a Patent Study is won, the full $50,000 is paid. We use the language "up to" because if the prior art we deem to be dispositive comes from multiple Advisors, then the Reward is shared among them. 3. Peer-to-Patent is for patent applications pending at the Patent Office, while AOP addresses patents which already have been granted. We formally endorse peertopatent.org by awarding profit sharing points to our Advisors who contribute to this valuable initiative. 4. For each Patent Study, we provide a questionnaire to assist our Advisors in determining eligibility, for example, due to employment. I hope this information is helpful and invite you to join Article One as an Advisor. I appreciate your valuable knowledge and time. Best, Cheryl Milone Founder and President Article One Partners, articleonepartners.com
Would it be too difficult to list the patent titles in the study description, next to the patent numbers and links? The summaries don't give much info about what patents are in question, but at least listing the titles might help. (For example, in the KEYBOARD - RIMM study, it would help to know that the patent disputes include "Hand-held electronic device with a keyboard optimized for use with the thumbs", "Hand-held e-mail device", "Hand-held electronic device with auxiliary input device", etc.)
Did I say overlords? I meant protectors.
--Konami is a malicious patent-abuser for patenting the technology behind and releasing essentially the same game as Guitar Hero years beforehand, and receiving no royalties for this? That is not the best case to use to win over otherwise neutral third parties like myself.
... but ... Guitar Freaks and Guitar Hero are so similar I have always assumed they WERE made by the same company, just the same company that got the idea to use copyrighted music. Seriously, they are like two editions of the same game.
I realize the point is that the patent is broad
The Software Toolworks released The Miracle Piano Teaching System back in 1990, that included a MIDI keyboard (with a non-MIDI-standard port) and software to teach people how to play the piano. The software included games to improve timing as well as games to improve note selection.
The system was available not only for Nintendo and Sega Gensis(Megadrive) game consoles, but also the Apple Macintosh, Amiga and PC computer platforms.
Hard to believe Konami was granted three patents for the same thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Piano
If there is no indication that the patent in question is new or non-obvious, well... then this is some weird kind of inverse patent trolling.
And yes. IAA(Patent)L. But not yours.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.