Slashdot Mirror
Website Attempts To Generate Every Possible Patentable Invention (allpriorart.com)
An anonymous reader writes: All Prior Art is a project attempting to algorithmically create and publicly publish all possible new prior art, thereby making the published concepts not patent-able. The concept is to democratize ideas and to preempt patent trolls. The work is released on-line and in files of 10,000 ideas under a creative commons license. The system works by pulling text from the entire database of US issued and published (un-approved) patents and creating prior art from the patent language. While most inventions generated will be nonsensical, the cost to computationally create and publish millions of ideas is nearly zero -- which allows for a higher probability of possible valid prior art.
I already did that years ago and patented the idea.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
it is an invention
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It was the best of times it was the BLURST of times? You stupid Monkey! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Way to ruin things for those who do legitimate research and development. Lots of people and businesses do research and then produce products or license their ideas to others to earn an honest profit and invest the money in additional r&d. Way to try to ruin things for those who don't abuse patents. Sometimes things like this can do a lot more harm than good. Just because the patent system is broken doesn't mean you fuckers have to try to ruin things for everyone. Reform the patent system to require that patents be used, that is to produce a product or attempt to license the patent. Don't ruin it for those who use them appropriately, which is a hell of a lot of inventors and businesses.
You poor poor idealistic people! It won't make a difference.
Disney is using stories and characters that have been in public domain for centuries and if you try to use any of the those properties, they'll sue you into oblivion.
But go ahead if this makes you feel better. And it entertains us with the naivete - we control the IP laws, the courts and the legislatures.
-Corporate America.
There is mounting evidence that copyright and patent protections do not serve there original intent:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
In fact, outside of trademarks, we are seeing quite the opposite. Here is a nice primer from the TED Radio Hour
Bravo to any system that seeks to subvert the onerous and unfair patent and copyright laws of the United States.
Like Hamburger Ear Muffs
Having looked at the site, I'm not too impressed. All they're doing is generating abstracts, not specific embodiments.
It's normal for any patent to come up against prior art (there's about 100 million patents on Espacenet, similar in the US archives). To get a patent granted you have to pick those apart and figure out what makes your invention novel. It can often be a minor difference that allows you to get a valid patent.
Since the abstracts generated by this site are not very specific, it'd be a trivial exercise to work around them. If they got as far as producing a full disclosure - with diagrams perhaps - then it'd be a bit more effective.
And let me know when they get anywhere near 100 million "inventions". Compared to what inventors are currently up against, this is a tiny drop in the ocean.
All possible inventions are described in the library of babel.
Give it some time and it will generate the complete blueprints for a T-800.
Years ago I registered the site publicpatent.org. I had planned for people to just submitted random stuff (i.e. idea A + idea B), so that stupid, obvious stuff would be in the public domain and no one could try to patent it. Using NLP to automate the stupid idea generation is great!
This is essentially no more than the concept of a library containing books with every possible letter combination:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Such a library necessarily contains every work that has ever been (or will ever be) written.
The problem with such a library (and the problem with All Prior Art) is that of search. Finding prior art that disrupts a patent that you need to make "go away") is just as impossible as finding the cure for cancer in the Library of Babel,
So the important question is whether you can go to a court of law and say "My opponent's patent is provably invalidated because it's already explained in the Library of Babel"? If that's a valid legal argument - then perhaps this is of use. But I strongly suspect it's a complete waste of time.
Of course one might argue that a physical embodiment of the Library of Babel (or *ALL* prior art) is impossible - but I might also argue that I've merely done text compression by writing;
while ( 1 )
for ( int i = 0 ; i MAX_PATENT_LENGTH ; i++ )
putchar ( "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789., " [ rand() % 39 ] ) ;
www.sjbaker.org
what a lot of rubbish: patent lawyers will argue:
prior art has to be public and it must be possible for the skilled person to find such prior art. Therefore, prior art needs to be embedded in a context where it could or would be found (text books, patent documents, publications on web whose intent is to publish non-jokes). That's not the case here: a database with largely shitty or random content would not be searched by the skilled person, and/or is not 'made public' in the sense of the relevant patent law provisions . Patent office are likely to follow that argument. Similarly, documents whose publication date dates back long enough, e.g one or couple of hundred years, is no considered 'prior art'. People always think with their stupid ideas they can change the word. Let me tell you: it's not that easy. Give it up.
This is a sad commentary on how abuse of US patent and copyright law has flourished.
Prior art has never been a hindrance before...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Programs are not creative. They do what they're told to do. I'd like to see it develop a warp drive engine that works.
They have re-invented monkey by the typewriter, and they are using computer power to stitch not separate letters, but words and phrases.
They have, however forgot several things.
It is the math. Some numbers, representing a possible number of combination of letters and words and ideas, are so high and so large, that there is not enough quarks in the universe to represent the number. If you have an infinitely large number and you use automation and software to reduce, you will still have a very large still unfathomable number of possible combination of ideas left.
Or put it the other way, you can employ not one but a trillion billion of monkeys and give each a super fast computer and the outcome will be exactly the same as having one monkey with the typewriter.
They changed it from first to invent to first to file if people remember in an effort to save time and money while speeding up the patent process. I also doubt it would help fight against the obvious clause as the person who does the patenting could say that a person didn't think of it and it was randomly generated and buried so the idea was in fact not obvious since a human did not think of it until now.
the patent office isn't going to check this database and after a patent it approved, it (sadly) requires more than just prior art to have the patent invalidated. the patent system is borked but this isn't the solution.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
There is prior art for prior art generators:
http://thesurrealist.co.uk/priorart.cgi
The older one is certainly more amusing.
A better system: DARPA- like competitions; winners get huge prizes, but have no ownership of designs, complete details of which immediately enter public domain. Performance criteria publicly stated prior to competition. Re-competitions with ever higher performance criteria until plateau. Judges for each round randomly selected from pool, without warning, lowering likelihood of corruption. Design objectives selected by campaigning, popular vote as to importance. Competition open to anyone in the world. Formal test beds for all players in a round can be chosen such that the relative performance of elements in competition can be clearly ascertained.
- Ford Stone
I have programmed my AI to file all possible lawsuits
And by "we" I mean every single member of the human race. We have access to 3D printed houses and cars and everything, how can you patent anything?
No thing like this has any meaning until it is tested in a court case. The likelihood that any court will recognize these machine-generated nonsense "patents" as exposing prior art is low. So while this may have some "discussive" value, it's very unlikely to have any legal value.
Publishing something about a rocket ship that goes to the moon isn't an invention, it's an idea. Ideas are considered prior art, but they aren't the type of prior art that prevents issuance of a patent.
I just came up with ways to do everything better, and also came up with ways to do everything that hasn't been done. Now nothing is patent-able.
April 1st was over a week ago, but nice try.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
any judge on the right side of the cash flow is going to call this process more non-art than art, and thus entirely not art. kick up a few bucks to appeals court, and you're all in maui by thursday.
you cowards are doing it wrong. buy guns.
This is like pointing to the sci-fi of E.E. "Doc" Smith and claiming you have prior art for a faster-than-light drive.
Prior art has to be anchored in the real world of invention and application or it means nothing.
you idiots at slashdot - i'm a patent examiner. Keeping the content quality as low as possible, slashdot ? retards at ./ ... !
The US switched from First-to-invent to First-to-File starting March 16, 2013.
This website is about 5-10 years too late.
Disney is using stories and characters that have been in public domain for centuries and if you try to use any of the those properties, they'll sue you into oblivion.
Disney will sue you based on their modern interpretation of these stories and characters. If the Disney version is what you or your kids will remember, it is most likely because the studio is really, really, good at this sort of thing.
A computer-generated e-book with every possible melody using up to 10 notes of a chromatic scale (12 different frequencies in an octave, as shifting up or down an octave doesn't change the melody musically) would have a little over 10 billion entries. The first note can always be C because transposing a melody to a different key doesn't change the melody (that's the whole point of a chromatic scale). And rests can be covered by a null note (raising the total possible notes to 13). 13^9 = 10.6 billion. You could probably go up to 12 notes and still fit it on a single uncompressed HDD. Publish that online via a searchable website, file the copyright by sending the Library of Congress a hard drive with the complete "work", and start suing the music studios for copyright infringement for every new song they put out.
This is just a waste of time. For a "printed publication" to be prior art it should enable a person of skill in the art to practice the invention, show the general public that that the person/author had conceived and was in possession of the invention on the date of the disclosure.
Now, as a standard practice, for publications with authors, USPTO assumes, that a printed publication in a peer reviewed journal or one made by a human being is true, and does not need to prove, "enablement" or "possession of the invention" by the publisher to reject patents.
But, a computer generated prior art database, for a person of skill in the art, is bullshit. A person of skill in the art will ignore it. Just as a book of every possible combination of words will never be searched to look for scientific knowledge, a person of skill in the art will never ever look at the All prior art database.
Hence, it's a misguided waste of computing resources. And even, if there is "prior-art," it's not legally prior art. Stop wasting time. Stupid stupid stunt.
I tried feeding it the opening line of one of my patents. Sure enough, it found it verbatim, along with random lines from other patents. Maybe if they threw some "deep learning" at it, they'd get somewhere.
The algorithmically generated prior art is probably not prior art at all. To be prior art, the description has to be published at a specific date. I don't see any dates on this prior art (here for example http://allpriorart.com/1459996...). Further, even if it had a date, it's unclear if this was ever "published". A single URL sitting on the internet is probably insufficient to meet the publication requirement if the link isn't accessible from some indexing or search system. Even the 10,000 prior art inventions posted to archive.org (here https://archive.org/download/A...) could arguably not be considered accessible if there is no real way to find anything within them.
This has a long way to go before it could be considered practical. That said, it's an interesting idea.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
This is so much more efficient than training 10,000 monkeys as patent attorneys and letting them loose to patent ideas.
How many unique English tweets are possible? How long would it take for the population of the world to read them all out loud?
Even with only 140 characters, there are *a lot* of possible English phrases.
And what if you tried to store them all for future reference? You'd end up boiling the world's oceans.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Surely prior art has to be an actual, physical thingamagig,
not just an 'idea' scribbled on the back of a napkin.
Go well
Peanut-butter powered horse launcher? Check!
Table-ized A.I.
... that everything written in response to an article on patents/IP will be the usual uninformed horsesh*it.
There's a weird inverse square law on slashdot when it comes to patents, the smarter the people posting, the dumber the comments.
Everyone's a patent law expert... oh yeah...
Aaron Swartz did something similar with legal court documents, but it resulted in the government going after him and murdering him.
Hopefully these guys are smart enough to take precautions.
It's only art if someone produces it. Unless you can show there's some sort of AI or other intelligence, I would think they could argue it's not art. It's machine output.
There's also a heck of a lot of work to do for patents. You have to have a notebook, that has numbered pages. You need to show how you came to this invention. You also have to mention prior art. And so on.
Being a patent troll isn't easy work. A whole lot easier than coming up with a real invention, however. I'd argue that if a company isn't using the patent, it's invalid. That would blow a lot of them away right there.
The system is "first to patent", not "first to invent". Prior art makes no difference if you don't have $4M waste trying to convince the trolls jury you're innocent.
Cloem does this for years.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloem.
Also "PATENTS IN AN ERA OF INFINITE MONKEYS AND
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE" in the Stanford Technology Law Review at https://journals.law.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/stanford-technology-law-review/print/2015/10/19-1-2-hattenbach-glucoft-infinite-monkeys.pdf ;
Other articles at https://cloem.com/flat/news/
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnxlZox00nw
We have created more than 100 billion texts (man and machine). We are preparing a major release ("free algorithmic patenting"): vocabulary choices, patent classification tools, browse and search options, etc. In the coming weeks, last efforts at the moment.
Best regards,
the Cloem Team
... how most Internet of Things devices were invented.
> A device for interconnecting the buttering of tcp-aligned toast for a network-aware breakfirst.
> Wearable bluetooth-capable scarf designed to fulfill the modern needs of internet connected fitness tracking on the go
1. that royalty income is different from wages and capital gains and needs its own Lafferized (rates must always track just below discouraging activity) marginal tax rates.
2. that the expatriation tax needs to be Lafferized as well as applied to coporate inversions.
3. BINCE 1970
Basic Income for the Non-College Educated born before 1970
Criteria for Eligibility
1. Born before 1970
2. No college education, this is the leading factor in earning limitations
3. No investments
4. No home ownership
5. No inheritance
6. No business ownership
7. No membership in a protected class (straight white Christian male). Membership in a protected class means eligibility for assistance based on said status.
These criteria are the result of a subclinical disability (enough to iff-affect earning potential but not sufficient to merit public assistance).