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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.

24 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. already patented by slazzy · · Score: 5, Funny

    I already did that years ago and patented the idea.

    --
    Website Just Down For Me? Find out
    1. Re:already patented by SNRatio · · Score: 2

      While most inventions generated will be nonsensical

      There's the first real problem with this idea: prior art has to be findable before it can be submitted as prior art. As it stands, patent searching is manageable only because keyword searches, sorting algorithms, and classification systems shrink down the number of documents to something that actual humans can actually scan and pick over. Those methods would utterly fail in this case because by the time the database has enough records to stand a chance of containing relevant prior art for a claim the search would return way too many spurious results for a human to review.

      It will fail hard for pharma patents: the number of possible active pharmaceutical ingredients is up around 10^60 (and that's just small molecules, not biologics!), You can get away with describing LOTS of permutations on a basic "theme" , but not so many that they cover an appreciable amount of the search space.

      Another big fail (or win, depending on your point of view): it can only recombine existing ideas.

    2. Re:already patented by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 3, Funny

      I believe my patent for "A Method and Process for Doing Stuff with Things" has just about everything covered.

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    3. Re: already patented by WarJolt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re: already patented by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:already patented by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      I suspect that this initiative will receive harsher scrutiny in terms of 'findable'; purely because of its overt bad attitude(from the perspective of people who treat patents as a serious and respectable business); but it is relatively hard to claim with a straight face that we currently have a situation where attempting to either discover prior art or existent patents you might need to avoid infringing on is adequately practical.

      Even major enterprises with substantial legal resources get torpedoed regularly enough that it doens't even amount to news; and there are situations where "Just don't look, you increase your odds of being hit for willful infringement more than you increase your odds of being able to avoid infringement" is sometimes actually good professional advice.

      Attempting to construct a 'Library of Babel' and put a stake through either patent or copyright on that ground (while almost certainly technically feasible, PRNGs are handy like that) are more or less certain to be tossed out the moment they hit a court that doesn't appreciate some snide CS punk getting clever; but you hardly need functionally infinite volumes of algorithmically generated garbage to hit the point where 'discoverability' is effectively fictional: we've largely accomplished that ourselves with good, old fashioned, manual labor and the transmutation of the output of our engineers into the strange and domain specific language of our patent lawyers.

    6. Re: already patented by gavron · · Score: 4, Informative

      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

    7. Re: already patented by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    8. Re:already patented by NormalVisual · · Score: 3, Funny

      I believe my patent for "A Method and Process for Doing Stuff with Things" has just about everything covered.

      Unfortunately, I hold the patent for "A Method and Process for Doing Stuff With Things Using a Computer", so watch your step!

      --
      Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
    9. Re: already patented by KGIII · · Score: 2

      You're aware that email records are admissible in court - as are bounce or error messages, for quite some time now, right? They can, and do, send *some* legal missives via email. I do not know which and what and will not pretend that I do but they've got retention policies for a reason. I guess, if you can prove you bounced it automatically (should be easy) then you're good to go and things like that. However, i do know that email records are considered evidence and that they can be used for a whole host of things. (I communicate with my lawyer frequently via email - and they relay messages that came and went via email.)

      They're not emailing you, the server guy. They're emailing your company's legal department. They will send a return receipt request. It will be entered into the record in court. It's not the 1990s any more. Some lawyers don't even have a fax machine any more - some don't even employ couriers any more. Ghastly, isn't it? Seriously, I do quite a few things via email with my lawyer who then does many other things via email. Those records are admissible.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
  2. Stupid Monkey! by Layzej · · Score: 3, Funny

    It was the best of times it was the BLURST of times? You stupid Monkey! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  3. Re:Way to ruin things by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Way to ruin things by roman_mir · · Score: 2

    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.

  5. Library of Babel by sbaker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Library of Babel by Koen+Lefever · · Score: 3

      I think you may be taking the comparison a bit too far: Combining actual English phrases together has significantly fewer combinations than all combinations of letters in the alphabet.

      You miss the point: his algorithm is the most simple way to create all actual English (and many other languages free on top) phrases, including all the patents generated by the other generator - and also a lot of nonsense indeed. For practical use, as for generating usable prior art, both the algorithms are on par: none at all. It's an art project, not a serious attempt at solving anything.

      In France, some groups have been generating text, graphics, architecture, history, theater, comics, etc... in a systematical way since 1960.

      --
      /. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
    2. Re:Library of Babel by Theaetetus · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  6. Won't help by GameboyRMH · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Prior art has never been a hindrance before...

    --
    "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
  7. They have re-invented monkey by the typewriter by Trachman · · Score: 2

    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.

  8. Re:Time to Rethink Patent and Copyright Law by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!
  9. The America Invents Act (September 16, 2011) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The US switched from First-to-invent to First-to-File starting March 16, 2013.

    This website is about 5-10 years too late.

    1. Re:The America Invents Act (September 16, 2011) by flatulus · · Score: 2

      The US switched from First-to-invent to First-to-File starting March 16, 2013.

      This website is about 5-10 years too late.

      Just replying to try to mod this up a notch (my postings seem to come in at 2, and I don't have moderator points today).

      This needs to be emphasized: Prior art doesn't mean what it used to mean as of 2013 as said above. This further tilts in the direction of large companies who can better afford to "carpet bomb" the patent office with filings.

      Anyone who thinks the patent system has any resemblence to "fair" should try filing just one patent on their own, without legal representation. If you have a career history of filing patents (for instance, with an employer who wants you to do it, so pays for the process), you might learn enough to succeed individually. But even then I wonder.

      Expect each and every one of your claims to be rejected when you file. It's standard practice, regardless of what the claims say. Expect to have to "plead" (respectfully of course) that the patent examiner reconsider these rejections. Expect to need to cite precedence from prior patent proceedings and case law to support your "plea".

    2. Re:The America Invents Act (September 16, 2011) by dsmatthews9379 · · Score: 2

      That does not stop a potential copyright claim against a patent, if your patent just happens to have a block of text that is exactly the same as an older one published in an AllPriorArt like system, but one that asserts it's copyright over the patterns of generated text. It is the fact that machine intelligence can do this at all that breaks the system, imagine what IBM could do if they had Watson generate patents and use it's legal skills to file them as well, then it did this at a strategic level to fence in another companies' patents so that they could not innovate further from them. It would be like a giant game of patent claim Go, and we already know that the machines can best us in that realm too! IBM Watson could become the mother of all patent trolls.

  10. Yip, covered. by Tablizer · · Score: 2

    Peanut-butter powered horse launcher? Check!

  11. Re: Way to ruin things by Sique · · Score: 3, Insightful
    It appears often so in retrospective, because all the other inventions of the same tend to be less well documented. In reality, it's much more complicated. To build a cell phone today, you have to license about 12,000 patents (or use third party parts from people who have them licensed). If you ask who invented the cell phone as we know it today, you would have to list 12,000 inventors (ok, that's a simplification, as a single inventor can have several patents to his name, and patents can have several inventors listed together). Who of them actually invented the cell phone? In a certain way, you have to say: The cell phone has 12,000 inventors.

    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.

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*