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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.
1) It won't change anything, because it's really unlikely this will produce anything that's considered valid prior art by a court. Think of it more as a performance piece than legal work. PI with each digit pair converted to ASCII also may have a description of everything that can be invented embedded somewhere in its non-repeating sequence, but we don't regard that as proof of prior art either. So, chill out.
2) There is no right to profit. The world doesn't owe you protection because, "I thought of it first!" Maybe it'll give you a temporary monopoly because it serves society's purposes - lucky you! - but that's a bargain the nation makes with you.
3) Fixing the brokenness of copyrights/patents (i.e. eliminating the concept of "intellectual property") by first corrupting it completely is a more worthy effort than any individual invention.
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
The cost of generating them? Nearly $0.
The cost of using machine driven patents as prior art to fight a patent troll? Millions.
A patent troll doesn't need a bullet proof patent to make your life miserable. It can be easier and cheaper to just pay them.
A patent troll doesn't need a bullet proof patent to make your life miserable. It can be easier and cheaper to just pay them.
It can be even easier and cheaper to just ignore them. My company has been threatened many times by patent trolls, including Acacia Research and Intellectual Ventures. In every case, we chose to just ignore them. Sometimes they sent a follow up letter. We ignored those too.
It costs more to pursue a patent lawsuit that to defend against one. Their business model depends on a quick payout. So they shotgun out lots of letters, waiting for some intimidated fool to bite. If you respond, you are basically saying "Hey, look at me, I'm a target!" Unless they have actually filed papers with the court, you have no obligation to respond.
Of course, if you talk to a lawyer, they will be horrified at the idea of ignoring a legal threat, and will instead recommend that you spend a lot of money on your lawyer. Here's another free lesson in life: Your lawyer does not represent your best interests.
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.
Willful infringement requires that you actually saw their claim and recognized it as such. "Mistakenly" confuse it for a coupon for something you didn't want and trowing it in the bin isn't illegal or willful.
Whenever confronted, pretend that is the first time you heard about them. Now they need to prove that they informed you of the "infringement".
Their business model is based on it being more expensive to prove them wrong than to pay them.
Make sure that they don't get a response without doing actual work.
Even if we go back to the age of the steam engine. Who invented it? The first known patent of something we would today call a steam engine was Thomas Savery. That was at the end of the 17th. century. But Thomas Savery's invention was a special typ of water pump, not just an engine. The first one who actually build an universal steam engine was Thomas Newcomen around 1710. His machine could be connected to many different types of consumer load. James Watt is said to have grown up with a Newcomen engine in the neighborhood, which he was watching for hours as a child. So what did James Watt actually invent? Differently than Thomas Newcomen's machine, his machine relied solely of the pressure of the steam boiler, while the Newcomen machine also needed the atmospheric pressure to work. James Watt's engines were faster running, could be built smaller and took less fuel than the engines before. Newcomen's machines were still running, his first one even survived James Watt, before it was decommissioned in the 1830ies. The company Boulton&Watt, which sold James Watt's machines, achieved 80% market share, so most steam engines sold for the next time were actually Watt's steam engines. But James Watt didn't invent the steam engine. He invented one type of steam engines. A pretty good and successful one. At the same time. James Watt's patents hindered any real progress, because engines with several coupled cylinders to make better usage of the boiler pressure could not be built as they all were found to be in violation. And James Watt fiercely fought anyone trying to improve the steam engine.
I think, the sole inventor who disrupts how the world does things is more of a romantic story then a real thing. Sometimes, a single inventor invents exactly that item at the tipping point which turns lots of loosely connected ideas how to do things into a workable and reliable product. But the product consists of so much more than that single item. And maybe it's another iteration of inventions, which renders the original invention of that crucial item obsolete, but the inventor of the item still gets remembered as the inventor, because he got some publicity for successfully selling the product, before better versions ate into his market share. Or he was late to the party, but because his version had some real advantage, he gets hailed for inventing the whole thing while all he did was some improvement.
Out of curiosity, once I tried to find out who actually invented the mixing valve. After digging up more than 2500 patents dating back to the 1920ies, I gave up. I couldn't even be sure what the first mixing valve was actually called. Probably not "mixing valve". But we have at least 2500 inventions which improved upon the mixing valve, so today, we just pull that single lever at the faucet not even thinking about how many people were involved in actually figuring out how to built it.