FOSS Community Can Combat Bad Patents

An anonymous reader lets us know about a new initiative designed to help shield the open source software community from threats posed by patent trolls. The initiative, called Linux Defenders (the website is slated to go live tomorrow, Dec. 9), is sponsored by a consortium of technology companies including IBM. "The most novel feature of the new program... will be its call to independent open source software developers all over the world to start submitting their new software inventions to Linux Defenders... so that the group's attorneys and engineers can, for no charge, help shape, structure, and document the invention in the form of a 'defensive publication.' Linux Defenders will then also see to it that the publication, duly attributing authorship of the invention to the developer who submitted it, is filed on the IP.com Web site, a database used by the US Patent and Trademark Office and other patent examiners throughout the world when they are trying to determine whether a proposed patent is truly novel..."

Comments

Yeah but

[Orion Blastar]

can the FOSS Community Combat Bad Parents?

FOSS Community Can Combat Bad Patents?

What is a Bad Patent anyway? Slip the clerk a $100 bill to change the date stamp to the 1980's and claim everyone else stole from your patent?

I would rather think it would be something like trying to patent a FOSS name like "Linux" as a "trademark" and not a patent.

The cost of filing a patent is expensive, so when a FOSS invents something, someone else patents their work as their own, now that would be a bad patent. Can some FOSS group help FOSS afford patent fees to avoid others filing a patent for their work?