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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.
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?...
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.
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.
There is no right to profit.
- a correction: there is no entitlement to profit. A right is a protection of an individual against government oppression. An entitlement is an obligation by somebody to supply someone else with something under market value.
Everybody has the right to profit unless there is a law that prohibits that person or a group from profiting. Nobody should have an entitlement to profit, but unfortunately welfare is just that - an entitlement to profit.
You can't handle the truth.
If you're so concerned about making a profit from your idea and you don't want others profiting from it, keep it a trade secret.
Then responsibilty for protecting your profitable ideas remains solely with you rather than with government enforcement, you need never reveal your idea to anyone, ever, and so everybody wins, right?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.
The Constitution sets up the patent system. Yes, it's Constitutional law. But the GP has it correct - I am one of those inventors (18 granted so far), and I license them out for very low rates. Provable, measurable improvements, but trivial to copy/implement because it's mechanical in nature. Companies big and small (licensees run from one-man shops to Microsoft) license it for fractions of a percent of the value - and I make a decent income by volume. Consumer gets the benefits, manufacturer/brand gets the benefits, and I (the inventor) get the benefits. What's the downside?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
April 1st was over a week ago, but nice try.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Without patent protection how can medical R&D investment be justified?
Perhaps by public funding instead of private? That would eliminate the Martin Skrelis of the pharmaceutical business
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.
The US switched from First-to-invent to First-to-File starting March 16, 2013.
This website is about 5-10 years too late.
Sure it does, because in most cases, the number of people who think of it second is often zero. That is, only the original inventor will come up with the invention. Of course, the commies that rule this site will assert that the creation does not belong to the creator, rather it belongs to the masses.
That ship has sailed. The patent system already does a fine job of depriving people of the fruits of their labor and handing it over to people who did nothing. If this can actually kill the trolls (doubtful), then it will be a boon to all genuine inventors.
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.
Then they are obvious and should not be protected anyway.
Aside from the fact that this will probably be thrown out on some variation of 'because punk kids', even if there is no weightier legal consideration to be used; because this sort of bad attitude will not impress an arm of the judicial branch whose entire existence is devoted to taking patents seriously; do you seriously think that Alexander Reben, a single engineer/artist/MIT Media Lab product has the slightest chance to 'reform the patent system', even if that were is objective?
Doing this requires a relatively tiny outlay for computing resources, some creativity, and some programming abilities. "Reform the patent system" has proven to be a difficult goal even if you possess lobbyists, lawyers, and financial resources somewhere between "one of the top few hundred largest corporations in the world" and "nation state with realistic aspirations to a security council seat".
I am 100% ideological, my ideology is objective reality.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
We would've had 3-D printers about 20 years earlier, except it was patented. 3-D printers only came to the public once the patent finally expired! prior to that they were $30-$60,000
East Texas courts
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.
Calculus was discovered near-simultaneously by two separate individuals. Ditto telephone, lightbulb, and many other truly transformative inventions. This is not a coincidence: inventors take the problems of their day starting from roughly the same base of established knowledge. A super-exceptional individual may be able to advance humanity some couple of decades thru their insight, but with billions of brains on the planet, somebody else would have eventually figured it out. There are valid argument for patents; increasing the pace of technological progress is chief among them, but to argue that NOBODY would ever discover the same thing is just silly.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
The Constitution sets up the patent system. Yes, it's Constitutional law.
Actuallly, the Constitution of the USA merely allows for it, it doesn't mandate it. Having no patent system at all would be just as constitutional as the current situation.
There's nothing like $HOME
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.
We long ago reached the point where people like you are the tiny majority and the great majority of patent holders are major corporations that use them to crush upstart competitors such as yourself. The original intent of patents has been turned on its ear, and it's now a weapon to protect incumbents.
Surely prior art has to be an actual, physical thingamagig,
not just an 'idea' scribbled on the back of a napkin.
Go well
I've independently invented lots of things that I later found out were commonplace.
I've also independently invented two things which were not common, and which were later patented by someone else.
In the second case, had I published my work, I might have (at least) had a chance at limiting the other party's patent on my creation.
But since I did not publish it, and never pursued a patent myself, I don't have a verifiable leg to stand on.
If TFA describes a place where ideas can be published, then they are providing a good place for prior art to be a thing. This doesn't mean that the idea can never be included in a patent, necessarily, but it shows that at least a portion of the patent was invented previously (and should be referenced in the patent's own statements of prior art).
As it is, though: I'm technically not allowed to use two of my own inventions, which is at least an emotional burden.
Kid-proof tablet..
And you are nothing, if not consistent. I've said it before and I'll likely think of again another time. I don't generally agree with much of what you have to say but you are consistent in your beliefs and your expressions of them. That may seem trivial but it's not. Not many people are like that - most hold some rather absurd views that are contradictory to one another. And yes, that is most. That is not hyperbole nor intended to be mentioned in passage. I might even go so far as to say that the vast majority of people hold contradictory views. (What's odd is that they'll be vocal about both of them, in succession, and I don't think they even notice.)
So, there's that. I think you're a fucking lunatic and I wouldn't want you to be in charge of anything more important than a breadbox but I do appreciate that you hold the views you do - and that you remain so and accept the consequences of those actions. Albeit, you only accept them online in in the form of karma (inasmuch as I'm able to prove) and accept them you do. One might even go so far as to say that you're logically consistent. I'll even go so far as to say that sometimes your logic is quite sound. Again, there's that.
That's not even a backhanded compliment. If nothing else, that's a modicum of respect. You're a lunatic but you're not entirely illogical and consistent.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Peanut-butter powered horse launcher? Check!
Table-ized A.I.
And that's why I said "often zero" in my original post. In the some rare, exceptional cases, multiple inventors come up with same invention, but usually, it's only one individual/group that comes up with the invention.
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.
Well, the cell phone is complicated device... it's practically a shrunk version of your laptop/PC so its many software/hardware components have been individually patented.
Without the original Watt patent, these "coupled cylinders" invention would not have even existed. So either the new invention's owners should license the original patent or wait for it to expire. After all, patents are all about monopoly. And a 17 or 20 years monopoly is just an inconsequential blip in the grand scheme of technology and progress. Eventually, the steam engine area will have reached its innovation peak, and there will be few, if any, inventions in that area, so what's wrong with waiting 17 years for your 17 year monopoly.
So the coupled cylinder idea is independent of James Watt's type of a steam engine, as the principle would also work with Thomas Newcomen's invention.
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.
... 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