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.

Comments

already patented

[slazzy]

I already did that years ago and patented the idea.

Re: already patented

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Library of Babel

[sbaker]

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 ] ) ;