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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.
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It was the best of times it was the BLURST of times? You stupid Monkey! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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
Prior art has never been a hindrance before...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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!
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.