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Inventor Says Google Is Patenting His Public Domain Work (arstechnica.com)
Rob Riggs writes: Jarek Duda, the inventor of a compression technique called asymmetric numeral systems (ANS), dedicated the invention to the public domain. Since 2014, Facebook, Apple, and Google have all created software based on his breakthrough. Google is now trying to patent a video encoding scheme using the compression technique. The inventor is fighting Google in the European courts and has won a preliminary ruling. The fight's not over and Google is also seeking a patent with the USPTO. A Google spokesperson says Duda came up with a theoretical concept that isn't directly patentable, "while Google's lawyers are seeking to patent a specific application of that theory that reflects additional work by Google's engineers," reports Ars Technica. "But Duda says he suggested the exact technique Google is trying to patent in a 2014 email exchange with Google engineers."
All inventions are built on the complex work of others. But you cannot preclude someone from inventing new things using your public domain technology.
Did you RTFS? He is claiming that Google's extensions are also documented prior art.
Patent examiners only look at prior patents for prior art. They don't have the time to look else where.
If you share an invention that isn't patented, someone will find it and apply for a patent. It it really is novel and nothing like it has been patented before it will be granted. They will then use it to sue everyone you shared the information with. Starting with the little guys who can't afford a decent lawyer.
It's extremely time consuming and expensive to invalidate a patent.
So the US is in a first to file mode now and prior art doesn't mean a thing to invalidate a patent. Only a previous patent can.
Wow. You really need to read your own link, because that’s not at all what first-to-file means. From your linked article’s second paragraph:
[...] early disclosure under the FITF provisions is an absolute bar to later EPO patent.
Or, in English, an inventor who discloses their own invention before filing will never be able to patent that invention in Europe. Their own (non-patented) disclosure acts as prior art that invalidates the application.
First-to-file deals with who has the right to the patent, but most nations lack any form of grace period, so if the invention was already disclosed they will say that no one has the right, regardless of who did the disclosing and whether it was patented. Moreover, had you read your link, you’d have realized that the page spends quite a bit of time describing the distinctions between the first-inventor-to-file system that the US uses, which extends some grace to inventors who disclose their own inventions before filing, and the systems used in most of the rest of the world. Either way, however, filers aren’t protected from anyone else’s prior art.