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.
The US switched from First-to-invent to First-to-File starting March 16, 2013.
This website is about 5-10 years too late.
Anonymous Coward that should NEVER EVER pretend to practice law said:
"If they mention the patents in question and you ignore the letter, you get to pay for "willful" infringement instead of just infringement, which is much worse."
No.
Using imprecise words and just spreading misinformation and fearmongering. Better you would have just kept quiet. Didn't even have the decency to sign your name.
A "mention" in a "letter" is nothing.
If they serve you legal notice as per Rule 4.1 (US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) then you can respond as appropriate.
If they send you a letter and "mention" things (whatever the hell that means) you can safely use it as kindling for your weekend campfire.
There are a lot of lawyers. Some actors play them on TV and in the movies. If you want to be one, just go do the whole law-school,
bar-exam thing.
Don't make up shit on slashdot. It's something people like to do... but it's not good to spread FUD and misinformation.
Ehud
Tucson AZ US
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.
I believe you're right. In patent law, there's a doctrine that says that prior art is only useable for what it teaches. For example, H.G. Wells' "Time Machine" is valid prior art for the concept of time machines, such that you couldn't get a patent that claimed "1. A system comprising: a time machine," but if you went one step farther and included a claim directed to your temporal disruption modulator, Wells' story wouldn't be applicable against that.
Here's an example of the output of this database:
A faucet includes a spout, a handle, and a capacitive sensor operably coupled to at least one of the spout and the handle. The systems, methods, and programs may extract a language pattern from the stored text sample and may create an authorized profile based on the language pattern. The second part is put on standby and storing parameters of the action are stored in the chip card.
That's a nice string of phrases, but they teach nothing. You couldn't even use that to invalidate a patent on a faucet that extracts language patterns from a stored text sample and stores it in a chip card, because it has no teaching of how to build such a thing. Or even what that really means.
At best, you could use those sentences individually to invalidate a first patent that claimed "a faucet including a spout, handle, and capacitive sensor operably coupled to at least at least one of the spout and the handle" and a second patent that claimed "extract[ing] a language pattern from the stored text sample and may create an authorized profile based on the language pattern and a third that claimed "putting [something] on standby and storing parameters of the action in the chip card."
But there's a problem with that, too. From the database's description:
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.
In other words, each of those sentences already appear in issued or published patent applications, and are already prior art. In fact, if you wanted to really invalidate any of those, you'd pull up the corresponding patent they used to create the prior art database, and it would include that sentence plus a whole bunch of additional details.
So, not only does this not actually create any new prior art, it's less useful than the original data they're pulling from.
Disclaimer: I am a patent attorney. Feel free to accuse me of bias and say that my background invalidates my opinion, but that doesn't mean it's legally or logically incorrect or that federal circuit judges - many of whom are patent attorneys - will not come to the same conclusion.