Slashdot Mirror
UK Launches 'Peer To Patent' Pilot Project
An anonymous reader writes "Inspired by a proposal by Beth Noveck, professor of law at New York Law School, the Minister for Intellectual Property, Baroness Wilcox, launched a UK 'Peer To Patent' pilot project to identify prior art in patent applications by harnessing the wider community of experts and engaged citizens." We could use something like that, too. Perhaps Noveck could get together with Carl Malamud to hash out a system that encourages participation.
I know this is kind of unrelated to TFA, but let me say something I enjoy thinking of: Decentralization is on the way.
More and more, governments and corps realize that a single entity to enforce law is nowhere near as efficient as it used to be.
Having a police or a cyberpolice to track crimes and enforce whatever you thought was right used to be quite efficient. But the ease at which people communicate and exchange informations or objects now makes it nearly impossible (if not totally) to monitor what every single one does. Sure they could cross that fated line and start walking into people's privacy for no appearant reason, but they should prepare for a mob of "mah freedon of spech!!!11!".
Point is, it's now much safer to rely on people themselves (the educated kind, of course (whatever the fuck that means)) to regulate the rest. But it's putting the very existence of a government, and more generally, of a single law enforcing entity, in question. Slowly. Everytime.
Feels good to believe in Anarchy.
This may help or slightly harm the situation.
We have a problem with thickets of patents, like the 900+ patents in the MPEG LA portfolio. Weeding out a few here and there will not help.
In the 90s, there were problems with single patents (public key crypto, LZW, etc.), but corporations nowadays don't gamble their monopolies on single patents. They use thickets.
The USA have been trying peer-to-patent, but there's no visible change in the patent problem there. What we need, for software, is abolition.
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Patent_review_by_the_public
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Raising_examination_standards_wouldn't_fix_much
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
US version: http://peertopatent.org/
The problem is that this approach is the world upside down. The correct approach would be that the polluter pays: make patent applicants put a certain amount of money into escrow (more and more general claims = larger amount of money), and if prior art is found then this money goes to the person/institution that dug it up (either the patent office or a third party).
This way you compensate people for spending their time on rooting out bad patents/claims, rather than more or less forcing them to do it for free because otherwise they may be badly affected by the granted patents.
Donate free food here
First off, this is awesome! Secondly, now that the US is "first to file" we could adopt this very system too -- There's no good reason to keep any part of the patent application secret (as similar projects have in the previous US & AU pilots). I mean... Why not give the public a few leads to go on when searching for prior art? We are doing their jobs for them, the PTO might as well give us the tools/information we need to work with (otherwise: Hamstring much?).
The secrecy needs to be barred outright: If a patent is valid, who cares if someone uses your idea sooner; This just means you can make money on it sooner. If the patent is invalid, well, that's the risk you take when you seek a legal monopoly over an idea... Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Since the purported purpose of patents is to get the ideas to the public (for the betterment of society) then this is a win on both accounts.
I used to believe that the US patent system was fundamentally flawed because they have no test for obviousness (hint: just because no one already patented it doesn't mean it's not obvious), and that they are trying to filter an entire world's prior art via a relatively small number of examiners in a relatively short period of time (the odds of that working out for the benefit of society are inconceivable!).
However, with some of the ridiculous, and outright wrong patents (swinging on swings, duplicate patents, "on-the fly" hash table modifications, etc.) It's apparent that the applications aren't even being read (esp. not by anyone who's even remotely "skilled in the arts").
I seriously hope this pilot project becomes permanent, and that the World adopts a similar public standard test (though 90 days is a bit short, esp. when granting monopolies that could destroy entire markets). Then, we could be sure that the patent filings will actually have a chance of being read by people other than those who have a vested interest in granting more patents...
P.S. If this practice were made permanent it would cause me to release more of my code as FLOSS just to provide more proof of prior art (another win for the claimed mission patents serve) -- currently I've been close sourcing a few things because my code being open makes it too easy for patent trolls...
Actually we Brits don't. The service is based on the same system which already exists in the US and Australia.
Even the *submitter* didn't RTFA, which I think is a new Slashdot low.
Yes but taught in R.E. classes not Physics/Science classes...
^_^
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
They have a Minister of Intellectual Property? Does he work in the same building as the Ministry of Silly Walks?
Wait, this is for real?
Here's the list of ministers.
But if you find the words amusing I think you'll have more fun with "Assistant Government Whip", or "Lords Chief Whip". This is what happens when you're country has had a parliament for approaching 800 years. You have a Secretary of the Treasury, we have a Chancellor of the Exchequer :-)
'Surely this is a tacit admission that the patent office is not capable of doing it's job?'
Maybe because some of these patents are written in such impenetrable English that they might as well have come from a Cylon base ship hybrid:
http://peertopatent.org.uk/patent/2458182/claim/0003/show
'...wherein prior to initiating encryption of said data said further processing device initiates generation of a secure signature from said data and initiates encryption of said secure signature and storing of said secure signature along with said secure data; and in response to receipt of said signal to resume said task said further processing device initiates retrieval of said encrypted secure signature and decryption of said encrypted secure signature and following decryption of said encrypted secure data initiates generation of said secure signature from said decrypted encrypted data and S comparison of said generated secure signature with said decrypted secure signature; and in response to said generated secure signature not matching said decrypted secure signature said further processing device issues an signal to said data processor to indicate that said data has been tampered with; and in response to said generated secure signature matching said decrypted secure signature said further processing device resumes said task using said decrypted data; mists of dreams drip along the nascent echo and love no more. End of line.'
It wouldn't be taught at 5, R.E. classes start around 11. And yes, it makes a big difference which class things are being taught in. You could teach kids Star Trek "physics" in Physics classes and a lot of them would just take it at face value, without questioning. If instead you taught them the same things in an English science fiction module, they would know it wasn't real.
which is totally what she said
Everyone in my entire year at least knew RE was a joke class.
If other words - if the underlying method was allowable, the computerised version was also allowable.
The point is that "business method" and other nonsensical mathematical processes aren't allowable. I.e. you could have patented computer-controlled ABS in a car (because it was new, innovative, non-obvious, and the computer wasn't necessary to the invention) but you STILL can't patent ways to advertise at clients using sounds (because that's a business method patent, is obvious, has prior art, etc. and thus is invalid whether you do it on a PC, or a cloud-farm, or on paper).
What that says is that the computer program DOES NOT form part of the patent unless the job it is doing DOES (in which case it can't just be, say, anti-aliasing a font because that's just a matrix multiplication and anti-aliasing has been applied to everything in the past and doing it on a computer or to a font makes no difference).
The UK doesn't have software patents. We have a tiny piece of case law (which is easily overruled because the EU-wide law it's based on doesn't have that) above and beyond the EU's blanket "no-software-patents" policy, none of which really affects the outcome unless it's an extremely close call about whether something is patentable AT ALL (and the fact of it being software or not is completely incidental)
It's not taught as fact. It's simply taught as "this is what some Christians believe". In science classes it is nowhere to be found. RE is comparative religious education, and in no way indoctrination of any kind.
Most of the whining I read about patents is from people who don't do much original work.
The MPEG issue isn't a patent validity issue, anyway. It's an antitrust issue. Narrow patents are easy to get but only useful in areas where there's a de-facto standard. Classics in this area were the Hayes modem escape sequence patent (wait, send "+++", wait), the GIF compression patent, and the DOS file system long name patent. Each was quite narrow, and there were other ways to do something equivalent. But because the dominant company in the industry was able to establish a de-facto standard in that area, with which others had to be compatible, it was hard to work around the patents.
Note the phrase "dominant company in the industry". That's a phrase from antitrust law. Only a company with a monopoly, or a trust (which MPEG-LA is) can exploit a narrow patent in that way. If the US DOJ had an antitrust operation that was as aggressive as it was from 1940 to 1970, we wouldn't have this problem.