Steve Jones writes "With the EU being rumored to look at software patents again I thought I'd have a look at the root of the problem — the US Patent Office — and work out if there is a simple way to defeat dumb patents. The big thing that defeats a patent is prior art. At the Patent Office they have the definition of Prior Art that includes the phrase: 'known or used by others in this country, or was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country.' Now suppose that every time we have an idea that we think is 'obvious' but that hasn't been done before, or something we think would be interesting but don't have the money to create — that we blogged about that idea, tagging it as 'prior art' via Technorati. This would give people an RSS feed of prior art." Read on for more details of Steve's proposal.
My argument is that by doing this we can, rightly, claim that the ideas have been described in the 21st-century version of a printed publication. Even if that is challenged, it is undeniable that by using the RSS feed it can be proven that people in a given country could have "known" about it.
I'm fed up thinking "Bloody hell I did that ten years ago," or "I thought about doing that, its a bit obvious" — when companies with as little intention as I had in developing the idea start putting the squeeze on businesses and developers. What I've always lacked is the visible proof to submit against a claim. This is a simple suggestion about using the power of the Web to create a massive prior art database. IANAL, but could it be this simple?
The problem with this is that the vast majority of prior art is so obvious that no one would think of cataloging it beforehand. Take, for example, Amazon's infamous 1-click case [wikipedia.org]. Who would have thought it neccessary to catalog "a technique of allowing customers to make online purchases with a single click" as prior art? It wasn't until Amazon patented this that anyone even THOUGHT about this as something that needed to be defended as obvious.
Sure, in RETROSPECT, many of these crazy patents are obvious. But how could you possibly begin to catalog every obvious idea, technique, innovation, or invention?
This is not to mention the practical problems with this website. Who is going to pay for all the lawyers you need after the site becomes embroiled in about 1,000 lawsuits? Who is going to determine WHICH art is truly "prior" when users start fighting over who "did it first"? How are you going to deal with griefers and hucksters who spam the site with stuff like "A technique by which ink is applied to paper using an ink-filled tube" (or, God forbid, try to claim their own patent on obvious stuff by using the site as evidence).
It would take a lot of time, effort, and money to make the website something worthwhile. There would probably have to be some editorial control, but since you are trying to list everything obvious, it would become kind of overwhelming. In addition to some of the problems mentioned in the parent, there would be arguments about what is "appropriately" obvious and what is just stupid.
There are several web sites out there that do nothing but publish your ideas (like these guys [ip.com]) so that they can be recorded as prior art. The stupid part is that they charge a very high fee. There needs to be a free site that is add-sponsored and community supported. In fact, if no one else does it, I'll do one. I already have my own dumb idea blog [billrocks.org] for this purpose. If a few of you respond to this post, suggesting that I actually provide this free service (and maybe some nice ideas about what web host, what CRM software, what to do to get paid adds, etc), I'll go ahead and do it. If any of you would rather do this yourself, please say so. I'd like to be an early user.
It would take a lot of time, effort, and money to make the website something worthwhile.
Eh, A talented web developer could setup a useful site in a weekend or two. To make it good would take a few months longer. It's not like we're talking about something extraordinarily complex here, just a site to post ideas that has a few fields to enter keywords, categories, and free text. Then make it searchable.
It wouldn't take any money to speak of, and it's even in the best interest of software developers, so there's motivation to do so. Hell, it's even in the best interests of large software companies as it takes some burden off them for obvious software patents. The only people it's NOT in the best interest of is scumbag IP companies who don't produce anything but lawyers who sue other companies who actually DO produce things.
>>Including every idea would be a necessity I think too much spam and trolls would preclude it from ever being considered as "published" or have much respectability by the patent office. It could become just a bunch of male enhancement ads. It could also just become a huge adwords-type project where every search term returned a bunch of focused advertising.
I also used an example of a novel, which cannot be patented to begin with. Some people will confuse copyrights, patents, and trademarks. (I don't kn
The only way that the present proposal would offer any benefit beyond a random web search for prior art (which you can do nowadays if you really want to invalidate a patent) would be to have a system that was organized and exhaustive. It would have to be very well organized and categorized, and people would have to actively watch what companies are doing, and preemptively writing long discussions about "obvious solutions" to potential problems. These entries would have to be analyzed by others, and refined in some way. Spam and bogus entries would have to be trimmed.
Ideally, a community of volunteers would watch patents as they are granted (or applied for) and would do their own research, amassing links to prior art that exists elsewhere. This data would then be easily available to anyone who wanted to challenge the patent. By lowering the barrier to challenging software patents, such a system could conceivably reduce the number of frivolous patents.
However, ultimately to be useful it will require considerable work from alot of volunteers. Merely tagging random blog entries with "prior art" isn't useful--everything you do is prior art for a sufficiently stupid patent claim. So every single page on the internet is "prior art" for something... the tough part is organizing this all so that when you are challenging a particular claim, you can quickly find the prior art that is relevant (and so that you can, with some authority, prove that the prior art existed before a given date).
A useful volunteer-based anti-patent website is not impossible. Wikipedia proves that you can organize volunteers to generate something useful. A wiki format, for instance, would also inherently maintain histories and dates, making prior-art claims more heavily documented. But such a community will require significant effort by many people. Unfortunately, it stops becoming "a simple plan."
Too much software development over the past 40+ years has occurred behind closed doors, either literally or figuratively behind an NDA or employment contract, and that removes a very large portion of existing software from public consideration (most employers/agencies would not allow their intellectual property to be exposed in any way on a public site).
Because of this, I believe it is impossible for all prior art to be located or described in a publicly-accessible manner, and I suspect most prior art is actually hidden from public view in a large subset of software application areas.
Sure, in RETROSPECT, many of these crazy patents are obvious
The view through the rear-view mirror is always twenty-twenty.
If an invention becomes obvious only in retrospect then - just maybe - it wasn't so obvious at all. 1-click shopping is simply an idea. Amazon has a system that works.
It's not about whether prior art exists, it's about whether prior art exists AND it is seen by the patent examiner during the process.
Otherwise, you have prior art that could *potentially* be used to ust a patent, but that involves getting tied up in litigation which very few independent developers can afford.
There are already avenues to have prior art published (called 'technical disclosures'), some have more chances than others of being seen by examiners.
It's not about whether prior art exists, it's about whether prior art exists AND it is seen by the patent examiner during the process.
Indeed.
I think it is also compounded by the fact that, in my limited experience of filing a few patents, the USPTO only appears to search existing US patents when looking for prior art. The European patent offices, OTOH, also include scientific journals, etc, so tend to be more thorough.
We searched online databases of UK, EPO, WO, US, JP (Japanese, translated abstracts and later JPO provided [machine] translations), DE (German), FR (French) patents as a matter of course. It was down to the examiner to determine the scope of search to perform. We could also search hundreds of databases of technical disclosures (eg IBM's TDB - technical disclosure bulletins). All UK examiners had to be able to translate enough french and german language to be able to decide if a full translation was needed and we had other language translators to hand - JP docs were obviously important in computer fields.
Other databases included Elsevier journal databases and also paper files (go back 100 years or so) of all UK patents (which were phased out during my time there). In some areas we had libraries of other books and journals. Also if you could put a case for getting a particular publication you could get it - New Scientist and Nature were particularly popular!
One of the vital tools for prior art searches was the different "classification keys" - UKC, ECLA, USC... etc.. Basically all patent docs are given a key which defines the field(s) that it falls in, eg G06F 11/00C2 (http://v3.espacenet.com/eclasrch?ECLA=/espacenet/ ecla/g06f/g06f11.htm?q=11-00c2) is fault tolerance by degradation of service within a computer system. There will be 10's of thousands of patent docs in this category and some non-patent disclosures like TDB's or magazine articles may be categorised (EPO used to do this but UK not really). By crossing categories and using abstract and full-text keyword searching one wittles down the docs to look at.
I also did quite a bit of internet searching (too much) using several search engines as well as site searches and a few company databases that we had access too. The problem with internet citations was proving the publication date, vital to show something is prior art.
In G06F (which is roughly G4A in the UKC, http://www.ipo.gov.uk/patent/p-decisionmaking/p-cl ass/p-class-ukc/p-class-ukc-g.htm [ipo.gov.uk]) one tended to have about 1.5 days to do a search (sometimes it would be half a day, sometimes 5). In other less strenuous fields a lot less. This means possible a few hundred abstracts to read and digest to whittle down to maybe a dozen docs to read in full and then perhaps cite 3 or 4, depending what you find. Sometimes with searches that don't fit keywords well you'd read more abstracts. Sometimes you can find an exact hit in a few minutes and spend the rest of the time finding docs to cite that will preempt what the patent attorney will try to amend the claims to.
There's no lack of places to look for prior art.
Oftentimes you'd search and search because something seemed so obvious but wouldn't find a strong citation. The problem with obviousness objections is always that the patent agent (aka attorney) can comeback and say if it was so obvious why was no one been doing it (or documented it), show me some evidence. This is especially strong in a well worked field - why did so many people overlook this obvious step. Combinations of docs suffer from ex-post facto analysis - one has to try and work from the prior position and see if the notional skilled man in the art would put those docs together?
--- In response to the parent there's a requirement for US applicants to cite known US patents (and I think other prior art) that is particularly pertinent to their applications (I don't know the specific requirement). If they fail to cite something and it's proven they knew about it and it's relevant they can lose their patent (or at least be sued for big bucks). All major WO patent granting offices have to search at least a certain amount of literature - specific ranges of specific fields of patents; the US is such an office.
As I understand it, what matters is *published* prior art. You can get a patent invalidated if there was prior art that the patent office missed - but not just because somebody was already using the same invention in secret. However, you may not want the examiner to be able to see all prior art. As Don Marti pointed out [linuxworld.com], that would just allow patent troll companies to design more cleverly worded patents that get around the prior art but are still able to cause damage - and indeed are more difficult to inva
The core problem is that the USPTO, and those in a position to fix current brokenness (ie the whole patent machine), have no incentive to fix the system. From their perspective it is perfectly fine as it is.
USPTO has no accountability for the quality of its patents and is a nice little money-spinner for Uncle Sam. Making it semi-easy to get a patent makes more people apply wich generates more money. Make it harder and less people apply.
The patent lawyers love the current system. Lots of people applying for
I don't think the issue can be resolved. Either you have patents or you don't. If you do then stupid patents will ALWAYS get through you can't stop it. Some articles say throw man power at it but considering places like the NIH are losing massive amounts of money (and heck they only look for cures to devastating diseases) because of the war, I hardly doubt the patent office will magically prove 100x more important and get all this extra cash.
Also define good/bad/obvious/etc. They are all subjective
Ah yes. This sounds a lot like my 'electronic patent-nulling system'. You can license it from me, if you like. Does AU$500/user/year sound reasonable?:)
Personally, I don't think we can record all the blindingly obvious stuff we think of, mainly because it's blindingly obvious. Or very often, we can think of salient prior art that would probably invalidate any patent claims, so we assume it's not worth mentioning.
I would rather see the patent process made a little more transparent: any patent application has to go through 90 days on a public wiki or discussion board, where we could view applications and immediately reference prior art. This might simplify the job of the patent reviewers, who cannot possibly know the history of entire industries. They could simply check out the claims of prior art (which themselves could be ranked by visitors for validity -- "oh ya, I remember THAT") and immediately see that, duh, one-click purchasing is a really dumb idea.
Why would anyone participate? First, it's in our nature. You might have heard of Slashdot, where people with varying kinds of brain matter make varying kinds of comments about varying kinds of "news." But second and more importantly, it would be protection. If you work in a business that would be affected by a one-click patent, you have incentive to make sure nobody can charge you for it, or sue you for using it, if it isn't really an original idea.
Today's patent process in the U.S. is slightly public, I know, but how about making it totally Web 2.0 and buzzword-compliant?
>>You might have heard of Slashdot, where people with varying kinds of brain matter make varying kinds of comments about varying kinds of "news." Where everybody thinks they are legal expert AND a quantum physicist, and where there is a lot of noise to filter out. And where many people think that a fair number of the moderations are wrong (or even absurd) and think the moderation system itself kinda sucks (how 'bout only giving one negative mod point, for example.)
This might simplify the job of the patent reviewers, who cannot possibly know the history of entire industries. They could simply check out the claims of prior art...
Why not make it mandatory for them to check it?
Better yet, why not make it mandatory for the party applying for the patent to check it? Since a patent application is supposed to be some sort of legal document ("I certify that we originated this novel idea, and am not aware of prior art..."), then this could be a chance for the applying party to withdraw their patent (admit that there is prior art). If a party doesn't withdraw their patent, and the patent is thereafter rejected on the basis of the prior art evidence from the site, then the applying party must pay a fine (or forfeit a deposit they made, or whatever).
Until we make it financially painful for companies to file bogus patents, they will continue to do so. The system you describe seems like the perfect way to warn a patent applicant that there is prior art. If they pursue their claim despite that knowledge, then they are breaking the law and should, at a minimum, be fined. (A harsher system would might also prevent them from applying for other patents for some time period, or perhaps even bring charges against the persons making the claims, or threaten disbarment for any lawyer who signs off on fraudulent claims.)
Whenever a patent is classified as "dumb patent" and the jury has decided that you went to the court with a "dumb reason", you will be requested to pay X times the amount requested to the court and the person/company you sued for wasting everybody's time. You would be put also on a probation period during which suing for "dumb reasons" would increase the X for each time you bother the court with invalid/stupid reasons.
Would work also for RIAA abuse.
Now that would save alot of time and money... Economics is based on incentive, people react to incentives and the courts are already enough busy to deal with these complaints.
I think this is the key to fixing the courts system, the patent system, and probably some other systems. If people have a patent that gets disqualified on prior art or simple and obvious, there should be a penalty. If someone takes a person to court with a specious case - whether they actually thought they could win, or just wanted to rack up legal expenses for someone they don't like - there should be significant penalties for both the plaintiff and the lawyer who took the case. I'm not saying every time s
This system you propose could get a big boost if the people populating the documentation/DB were those working for public universities and libraries. These people read a lot, and have the training to describe in fairly uniform detail what they've read. In fact, even the science fiction fans of the world, working with their libraries organized in "classes" like grad schools and book discussion clubs, could document most of the real prior art for most of the inventions engineers have produced in the past century or more.
Since these institutions are publicly funded, and that prior art puts the inventions in the public domain, the public's interest in running that process is obvious.
The Peer to Patent [typepad.com] project has gone live, and while it has its own problems, it's a simple, elegant solution that doesn't require something ridiculous like a massive database of ideas. Anyone can sign up and suggest prior art on submitted patents before they're approved. It's a good example of community self-policing.
This is already done and has been going on for a while.
The company where I work encourages everyone to submit patents whenever possible to the local patent layer. If it's deemed that the idea isn't really worth the effort to pursue a patent you're asked to write an article about it to be posted at a site that's specifically designed for some of the purposes mentioned in this story.
Darn it... I thought of this a while ago, I should have patented it.:-)
Seriously, the patent system in the US is broken and I don't think this would help. It, as was previously mentioned, would end up being abused by the patent trolls.
The problem isn't just the "dumb" patents, but it's the notion of a patent in the first place which is wrong. We should be working to eliminate all patents. No patent has ever spurred innovation; many have severely held it back. Some pharma patents are indirectly responsible for people dying.
The problem with your idea is that it helps the patent examiner, thereby reducing the ratio of dumb:smart patents. This lowers the cost of obtaining a patent. What we need is some sort of hash: if you have an "obvious" idea, you publish in such a way that it cannot be searched for easily until the patent has been granted (i.e. publish, but don't index) - thus the patent can be overthrown easily, but the patent office remains overwhelmed, inefficient, and expensive.
Are you really saying that these things would only be available as a result of the patent system? If so, why should anyone make aspirin nowadays - the patent has expired, so there's obviously no money in it! And most of the chemical industry was founded in Switzerland at the turn of the century - a country which did not (at the time) have patents. Incidentally, if you look into the history of Edison/Westinghouse, it isn't especially pretty - the fights over patents substantially slowed down introduction of
Currently we have many patents and 10% are solid and 90% are shakey.
Only one valid patent is needed to kill a project.
The worrisome patent holders all have hundreds or thousands of patents.
Weeding out the shakey ones doesn't get us very far. It leaves us still restricted, and it leaves the patent holders in a less shakey position.
Here's how patents work: MS thinks of an arbitrary way to do X, and then they patent 20 techniques related to this arbitrary technology. In this situation, there is rarely any prior art since the technique that MS is using isn't necessarily very smart - they could have chosen it simply because no one else does anything similar/compatible.
A simple solution would be to require all patents to be made public in full for a period (say 6 months) prior to acceptance, this would allow any interested parties to object to them *before* they are enforceable. Obviously there are a lot of patents applied for on an annual basis, - so to simplify this it may be possible to have patents categorised into areas in which they apply, with penalties for having a patent that does not in fact cover all the areas claimed, but also making clear that if an area is not included in the patent it is not applicable in that area. I cant see anyone who actually innovates and patents new ideas to have a problem with this as it should work quite well, moreover it would be in large companies interests to challenge patents that affect them, thereby helping everyone.
(IANAL so I have no idea if all or any of this is already the case)
I've got an idea: imagine travelling faster than light by using black holes to deform space-time beyond relativistic constraints. The idea is that you take an array of black holes and position them around the object; not only do you get a singularity, but the tidal forces can be arranged to cancel each other out, letting you move within the singularity without being destroyed.
I had an idea. I (effectively) blogged it. And if someone else comes up with it, and makes a working prototype, no sane person should argue that my blog should keep them from earning a patent.
Every patent is an obvious idea in retrospect. In reverse, it's also true that the idea of most patents was obvious beforehand: there were undoubtedly many people who thought that making an electrical device which produces light would be a great idea before Edison came along. The devil is in the details, and what matters is implementation. The standard of patents is that the process they describe should be sufficiently unique and innovative that an expert of the field would not conceive doing it that way prior to being introduced to the patented process; that's the logic that underlies the decision behind the Seldon patent decision [wikipedia.org].
Simply jotting down ideas doesn't address this issue at all. Even outlining the method doesn't really help, since the patent applicant could easily argue that while it might have seemed like an obvious approach, there were non-trivial technical issues that would arise in trying to implement that approach that their process addresses; the fact that the blogger would neither have mentioned those issues, nor built a working prototype, could reasonably be seen to support the applicant. The amount of effort that would need to go into each blog to actually make it worthwhile would basically boil down to implenting the idea, and that's far beyond what I suspect either the author wishes to suggest, or what any blogger would be willing to invest.
The problems with the patent process are well-established: an overburdened reviewing agency, combined with a fundamental issue regarding the appropriateness of patents on concepts rather than physical entities. I don't see how creating an unmoderated repository of random ideas solves either problem.
While this is an interesting idea in theory, it would unfortunately have little impact within the current system because patent examiners at the PTO do not have unrestricted internet access. In fact, what they have is extremely limited--they can't, for example, "google" for prior art. I believe the databases they rely most heavily upon are unique to the PTO. So in a system such as you propose, this prior art RSS feed would prove most useful as evidence in patent litigation for a party challenging the patent (I'm assuming, arguendo, that the quality and logistical problems with the concept could be solved). However, it would have little or no impact for examiners at the PTO, meaning no reduction in patents being granted. And once a patent is granted, it carries a presumption of validity...
Thankfully, the USPTO has begun a trial run of a new PEER-TO-PATENT system, as proposed by New York Law School Professor Beth Simone Noveck http://www.nyls.edu/pages/591.asp [nyls.edu] in Peer to Patent: Collective Intelligence and Intellectual Property Reform, which can be found at 20 Harvard Journal of Law Technology 123 (2006) for those of you who want some interesting reading--especially about how ridiculous each PTO examiner's workload is. The PEER-TO-PATENT Project http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/ [nyls.edu] between the PTO and NYLS will solve some of the issues with prior art (and obviousness, hopefully), but it'll likely be years before we start seeing any real progress on this front.
For the most egregious software patents, we will still *sigh* have to rely on private litigation for invalidation, but recent Supreme Court decisions (Ebay, MedImmune, Teleflex) may have made that process a little easier as well.
Even with prior art, having a patent invalidated doesn't make economic sense in most situations. For even if you win, you have to pay your attorneys fees yourself (often several $100,000). Also, the process can take several years.
Therefore even patents with solid prior art don't get invalidated most of the time. If you don't believe me, look up "Carmacks Reverse". The algorithm was patented by Creative _after_ John Carmack presented it on a conferece. Creative even threatened John's company because they are using the algorithm he had invented.
In many cases, there is never a problem finding prior art. Most software patents would never survive in court. The problem is that no company, working in their rational self-interest, would take the time, expense, and risk of a court case. It's cheaper to either take a settlement or fire back with their own patent warchest (resulting in stalemate).
Searching such a database must be an interesting excercise.
Consider, for example, the singular-value decomposition,
a common tool in mathematical computation. This can go by such names as...
Singular-value decomposition
SVD
Spectral decomposition
Principal component analysis
PCA
Eigen analysis
eigenimage analysis
Karhunen-Loeve transform
KL transform
This is further complicated by the fact that inventors are not always
up on the literature and may not know the proper names for things.
This isn't an insurmountable problem, but it's a big one even when
searching among existing U.S. patents.
The patent system is just some arbitrary way of encouraging innovation. The US system is obviously failing, as the costs of maintaining the system outweigh the benefits it imparts on our society.
Other countries have different ways of encouraging innovation, and in the long term, their economies may dwarf ours due to our failing system.
All property rights, be they Intellectual or Physical property, exist to encourage investment. No one "naturally" owns anything, though many people have been brainwashed into thinking that is the case.
I don't know which way is best. It seems the Stalinist system doesn't work well, and the US system has some SERIOUS problems which require periodic correction (trust-busting and such).
My advice: Watch the world economies, and don't be afraid to immigrate if you see one system collapsing and another rising. Of course, you should avoid contributing to economies in countries which deny fundamental human rights (China, Iran, etc.) but don't let nationalism blind you to economic realities.
I won't disclose how long ago I thought of this, but in the many years since I have not ever seen it done anywhere. So either it's a new idea, or it really doesn't work, or I just haven't looked around enough.
My idea is a simple syncronous motor without a controller that will run at double speed (6000 RPM at 50 Hz, 7200 RPM at 60 Hz). The idea is to construct the stator with 3-phase windings just like a normal syncronous motor. However, for the rotor, replace the permanent magnets with 3-phase windings powered by AC current coupled to the rotor through 4 slip rings. Wire the rotor windings so the rotating magnetic field turns in the opposite direction of the intended rotation and the stator field rotation. For proper startup, use 12 distinct windings organized as 6 pairs at opposite sides. Half of the windings will be wired to line-to-neutral power connections and the other half will be wired for 1.732 times the voltage and wired to line-to-line power connections. This should give a reasonably uniform magnetic field.
The problem which lies in your system is that it goes against the original idea behind patenting, imagine that you discover something truly revolutionary, you will be force to licence it to companies such as Sony or Microsoft for an amount of money while they have much more ways to leverage your idea using their funds. You will end up losing your own invention to them for a small amount of money.
And the fair value is a concept very difficult to define like you said... (is it from your point of view, is i
Would never work (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, in RETROSPECT, many of these crazy patents are obvious. But how could you possibly begin to catalog every obvious idea, technique, innovation, or invention?
This is not to mention the practical problems with this website. Who is going to pay for all the lawyers you need after the site becomes embroiled in about 1,000 lawsuits? Who is going to determine WHICH art is truly "prior" when users start fighting over who "did it first"? How are you going to deal with griefers and hucksters who spam the site with stuff like "A technique by which ink is applied to paper using an ink-filled tube" (or, God forbid, try to claim their own patent on obvious stuff by using the site as evidence).
Re:Would never work (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Would never work (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Just let the FSF do it (Score:3, Insightful)
Just let the FSF do it. They might not even need to have ads. Of course someone will need to filter out all the spam.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Would never work (Score:4, Interesting)
It would take a lot of time, effort, and money to make the website something worthwhile.
Eh, A talented web developer could setup a useful site in a weekend or two. To make it good would take a few months longer. It's not like we're talking about something extraordinarily complex here, just a site to post ideas that has a few fields to enter keywords, categories, and free text. Then make it searchable.
It wouldn't take any money to speak of, and it's even in the best interest of software developers, so there's motivation to do so. Hell, it's even in the best interests of large software companies as it takes some burden off them for obvious software patents. The only people it's NOT in the best interest of is scumbag IP companies who don't produce anything but lawyers who sue other companies who actually DO produce things.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
alt.patent.reform.bork.bork.bork
or, more seriously
misc.int-property
alt.inventors
Re:Would never work (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think too much spam and trolls would preclude it from ever being considered as "published" or have much respectability by the patent office. It could become just a bunch of male enhancement ads. It could also just become a huge adwords-type project where every search term returned a bunch of focused advertising.
I also used an example of a novel, which cannot be patented to begin with. Some people will confuse copyrights, patents, and trademarks. (I don't kn
Re:Would never work (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way that the present proposal would offer any benefit beyond a random web search for prior art (which you can do nowadays if you really want to invalidate a patent) would be to have a system that was organized and exhaustive. It would have to be very well organized and categorized, and people would have to actively watch what companies are doing, and preemptively writing long discussions about "obvious solutions" to potential problems. These entries would have to be analyzed by others, and refined in some way. Spam and bogus entries would have to be trimmed.
Ideally, a community of volunteers would watch patents as they are granted (or applied for) and would do their own research, amassing links to prior art that exists elsewhere. This data would then be easily available to anyone who wanted to challenge the patent. By lowering the barrier to challenging software patents, such a system could conceivably reduce the number of frivolous patents.
However, ultimately to be useful it will require considerable work from alot of volunteers. Merely tagging random blog entries with "prior art" isn't useful--everything you do is prior art for a sufficiently stupid patent claim. So every single page on the internet is "prior art" for something... the tough part is organizing this all so that when you are challenging a particular claim, you can quickly find the prior art that is relevant (and so that you can, with some authority, prove that the prior art existed before a given date).
A useful volunteer-based anti-patent website is not impossible. Wikipedia proves that you can organize volunteers to generate something useful. A wiki format, for instance, would also inherently maintain histories and dates, making prior-art claims more heavily documented. But such a community will require significant effort by many people. Unfortunately, it stops becoming "a simple plan."
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that it isn't practical. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because of this, I believe it is impossible for all prior art to be located or described in a publicly-accessible manner, and I suspect most prior art is actually hidden from public view in a large subset of software application areas.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The view through the rear-view mirror is always twenty-twenty.
If an invention becomes obvious only in retrospect then - just maybe - it wasn't so obvious at all. 1-click shopping is simply an idea. Amazon has a system that works.
Not quite enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Otherwise, you have prior art that could *potentially* be used to ust a patent, but that involves getting tied up in litigation which very few independent developers can afford.
There are already avenues to have prior art published (called 'technical disclosures'), some have more chances than others of being seen by examiners.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Indeed.
I think it is also compounded by the fact that, in my limited experience of filing a few patents, the USPTO only appears to search existing US patents when looking for prior art. The European patent offices, OTOH, also include scientific journals, etc, so tend to be more thorough.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I can tell you that it also searches foreign patents, from personal experience.
In my experience of searching for prior art ... (Score:5, Informative)
We searched online databases of UK, EPO, WO, US, JP (Japanese, translated abstracts and later JPO provided [machine] translations), DE (German), FR (French) patents as a matter of course. It was down to the examiner to determine the scope of search to perform. We could also search hundreds of databases of technical disclosures (eg IBM's TDB - technical disclosure bulletins). All UK examiners had to be able to translate enough french and german language to be able to decide if a full translation was needed and we had other language translators to hand - JP docs were obviously important in computer fields.
Other databases included Elsevier journal databases and also paper files (go back 100 years or so) of all UK patents (which were phased out during my time there). In some areas we had libraries of other books and journals. Also if you could put a case for getting a particular publication you could get it - New Scientist and Nature were particularly popular!
One of the vital tools for prior art searches was the different "classification keys" - UKC, ECLA, USC
I also did quite a bit of internet searching (too much) using several search engines as well as site searches and a few company databases that we had access too. The problem with internet citations was proving the publication date, vital to show something is prior art.
In G06F (which is roughly G4A in the UKC, http://www.ipo.gov.uk/patent/p-decisionmaking/p-cl ass/p-class-ukc/p-class-ukc-g.htm [ipo.gov.uk]) one tended to have about 1.5 days to do a search (sometimes it would be half a day, sometimes 5). In other less strenuous fields a lot less. This means possible a few hundred abstracts to read and digest to whittle down to maybe a dozen docs to read in full and then perhaps cite 3 or 4, depending what you find. Sometimes with searches that don't fit keywords well you'd read more abstracts. Sometimes you can find an exact hit in a few minutes and spend the rest of the time finding docs to cite that will preempt what the patent attorney will try to amend the claims to.
There's no lack of places to look for prior art.
Oftentimes you'd search and search because something seemed so obvious but wouldn't find a strong citation. The problem with obviousness objections is always that the patent agent (aka attorney) can comeback and say if it was so obvious why was no one been doing it (or documented it), show me some evidence. This is especially strong in a well worked field - why did so many people overlook this obvious step. Combinations of docs suffer from ex-post facto analysis - one has to try and work from the prior position and see if the notional skilled man in the art would put those docs together?
---
In response to the parent there's a requirement for US applicants to cite known US patents (and I think other prior art) that is particularly pertinent to their applications (I don't know the specific requirement). If they fail to cite something and it's proven they knew about it and it's relevant they can lose their patent (or at least be sued for big bucks). All major WO patent granting offices have to search at least a certain amount of literature - specific ranges of specific fields of patents; the US is such an office.
As an examiner I found US searches to usua
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
However, you may not want the examiner to be able to see all prior art. As Don Marti pointed out [linuxworld.com], that would just allow patent troll companies to design more cleverly worded patents that get around the prior art but are still able to cause damage - and indeed are more difficult to inva
Problem?? What Problem?? (Score:3)
USPTO has no accountability for the quality of its patents and is a nice little money-spinner for Uncle Sam. Making it semi-easy to get a patent makes more people apply wich generates more money. Make it harder and less people apply.
The patent lawyers love the current system. Lots of people applying for
Can't ever be fixed (Score:2)
Also define good/bad/obvious/etc. They are all subjective
Patent fodder (Score:5, Insightful)
Dan East
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
United States Patent Application
A Method For Using RSS Feeds as a Source for Obvious Ideas to Patent
Inventors: Anonymous P. Coward (Internets, U.S.)
Too late! (Score:5, Funny)
How abou Wikipatent.org? Or Yahoo Patent Answers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I don't think we can record all the blindingly obvious stuff we think of, mainly because it's blindingly obvious. Or very often, we can think of salient prior art that would probably invalidate any patent claims, so we assume it's not worth mentioning.
I would rather see the patent process made a little more transparent: any patent application has to go through 90 days on a public wiki or discussion board, where we could view applications and immediately reference prior art. This might simplify the job of the patent reviewers, who cannot possibly know the history of entire industries. They could simply check out the claims of prior art (which themselves could be ranked by visitors for validity -- "oh ya, I remember THAT") and immediately see that, duh, one-click purchasing is a really dumb idea.
Why would anyone participate? First, it's in our nature. You might have heard of Slashdot, where people with varying kinds of brain matter make varying kinds of comments about varying kinds of "news." But second and more importantly, it would be protection. If you work in a business that would be affected by a one-click patent, you have incentive to make sure nobody can charge you for it, or sue you for using it, if it isn't really an original idea.
Today's patent process in the U.S. is slightly public, I know, but how about making it totally Web 2.0 and buzzword-compliant?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Where everybody thinks they are legal expert AND a quantum physicist, and where there is a lot of noise to filter out. And where many people think that a fair number of the moderations are wrong (or even absurd) and think the moderation system itself kinda sucks (how 'bout only giving one negative mod point, for example.)
I think the idea does have merit, but
Re:How abou Wikipatent.org? Or Yahoo Patent Answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Better yet, why not make it mandatory for the party applying for the patent to check it? Since a patent application is supposed to be some sort of legal document ("I certify that we originated this novel idea, and am not aware of prior art..."), then this could be a chance for the applying party to withdraw their patent (admit that there is prior art). If a party doesn't withdraw their patent, and the patent is thereafter rejected on the basis of the prior art evidence from the site, then the applying party must pay a fine (or forfeit a deposit they made, or whatever).
Until we make it financially painful for companies to file bogus patents, they will continue to do so. The system you describe seems like the perfect way to warn a patent applicant that there is prior art. If they pursue their claim despite that knowledge, then they are breaking the law and should, at a minimum, be fined. (A harsher system would might also prevent them from applying for other patents for some time period, or perhaps even bring charges against the persons making the claims, or threaten disbarment for any lawyer who signs off on fraudulent claims.)
Parent
Blogs are "printed publications"? (Score:3, Informative)
A pretty good idea, but will the patent office see it that way?
Ummm.... (Score:3, Informative)
"I thought about doing that, its a bit obvious" isn't prior art, even if it were spelled correctly.
Prior Art Irony (Score:5, Informative)
Semantic Sticking Points (Score:4, Funny)
> Now to me it seems that a blog post can be classified in this day and age as the modern equivalent of a "printed publication"
Ah, a J.D. in the old "It Seems To Me" School of Legal Theory. Let me know how that works out for you.
Here is the most easy way to defeat "dumb patents" (Score:4, Interesting)
Would work also for RIAA abuse.
Now that would save alot of time and money
Re:Here is the most easy way to defeat "dumb paten (Score:3, Interesting)
Public Education (Score:3, Insightful)
Since these institutions are publicly funded, and that prior art puts the inventions in the public domain, the public's interest in running that process is obvious.
Better do it before some quack patents it.
Dumb Parents (Score:3, Funny)
Peer to Patent Project (Score:5, Informative)
Already done (Score:4, Informative)
The company where I work encourages everyone to submit patents whenever possible to the local patent layer. If it's deemed that the idea isn't really worth the effort to pursue a patent you're asked to write an article about it to be posted at a site that's specifically designed for some of the purposes mentioned in this story.
Another good idea (Score:2, Funny)
Seriously, the patent system in the US is broken and I don't think this would help. It, as was previously mentioned, would end up being abused by the patent trolls.
Any patents, not just "dumb" patents (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with your idea is that it helps the patent examiner, thereby reducing the ratio of dumb:smart patents. This lowers the cost of obtaining a patent. What we need is some sort of hash: if you have an "obvious" idea, you publish in such a way that it cannot be searched for easily until the patent has been granted (i.e. publish, but don't index) - thus the patent can be overthrown easily, but the patent office remains overwhelmed, inefficient, and expensive.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not what's needed (Score:4, Informative)
Weeding out the shakey ones doesn't get us very far. It leaves us still restricted, and it leaves the patent holders in a less shakey position.
Here's how patents work: MS thinks of an arbitrary way to do X, and then they patent 20 techniques related to this arbitrary technology. In this situation, there is rarely any prior art since the technique that MS is using isn't necessarily very smart - they could have chosen it simply because no one else does anything similar/compatible.
Peer Review (Score:3, Interesting)
(IANAL so I have no idea if all or any of this is already the case)
This is ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
I had an idea. I (effectively) blogged it. And if someone else comes up with it, and makes a working prototype, no sane person should argue that my blog should keep them from earning a patent.
Every patent is an obvious idea in retrospect. In reverse, it's also true that the idea of most patents was obvious beforehand: there were undoubtedly many people who thought that making an electrical device which produces light would be a great idea before Edison came along. The devil is in the details, and what matters is implementation. The standard of patents is that the process they describe should be sufficiently unique and innovative that an expert of the field would not conceive doing it that way prior to being introduced to the patented process; that's the logic that underlies the decision behind the Seldon patent decision [wikipedia.org].
Simply jotting down ideas doesn't address this issue at all. Even outlining the method doesn't really help, since the patent applicant could easily argue that while it might have seemed like an obvious approach, there were non-trivial technical issues that would arise in trying to implement that approach that their process addresses; the fact that the blogger would neither have mentioned those issues, nor built a working prototype, could reasonably be seen to support the applicant. The amount of effort that would need to go into each blog to actually make it worthwhile would basically boil down to implenting the idea, and that's far beyond what I suspect either the author wishes to suggest, or what any blogger would be willing to invest.
The problems with the patent process are well-established: an overburdened reviewing agency, combined with a fundamental issue regarding the appropriateness of patents on concepts rather than physical entities. I don't see how creating an unmoderated repository of random ideas solves either problem.
the PTO needs to change (Score:4, Informative)
Thankfully, the USPTO has begun a trial run of a new PEER-TO-PATENT system, as proposed by New York Law School Professor Beth Simone Noveck http://www.nyls.edu/pages/591.asp [nyls.edu] in Peer to Patent: Collective Intelligence and Intellectual Property Reform, which can be found at 20 Harvard Journal of Law Technology 123 (2006) for those of you who want some interesting reading--especially about how ridiculous each PTO examiner's workload is. The PEER-TO-PATENT Project http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/ [nyls.edu] between the PTO and NYLS will solve some of the issues with prior art (and obviousness, hopefully), but it'll likely be years before we start seeing any real progress on this front.
For the most egregious software patents, we will still *sigh* have to rely on private litigation for invalidation, but recent Supreme Court decisions (Ebay, MedImmune, Teleflex) may have made that process a little easier as well.
half baked (Score:5, Informative)
Warning: One can waste whole hours of one's life at a time on that site.
Carmacks Reverse (Score:4, Informative)
make economic sense in most situations. For even if
you win, you have to pay your attorneys fees yourself
(often several $100,000). Also, the process can take
several years.
Therefore even patents with solid prior art don't get
invalidated most of the time. If you don't believe me,
look up "Carmacks Reverse". The algorithm was patented
by Creative _after_ John Carmack presented it on a
conferece. Creative even threatened John's company
because they are using the algorithm he had invented.
Never a Problem with Finding Prior Art (Score:4, Interesting)
In many cases, there is never a problem finding prior art. Most software patents would never survive in court. The problem is that no company, working in their rational self-interest, would take the time, expense, and risk of a court case. It's cheaper to either take a settlement or fire back with their own patent warchest (resulting in stalemate).
Searching problems (Score:3, Interesting)
- Singular-value decomposition
- SVD
- Spectral decomposition
- Principal component analysis
- PCA
- Eigen analysis
- eigenimage analysis
- Karhunen-Loeve transform
- KL transform
This is further complicated by the fact that inventors are not always up on the literature and may not know the proper names for things.This isn't an insurmountable problem, but it's a big one even when searching among existing U.S. patents.
evolution will sort it out (Score:4, Interesting)
Other countries have different ways of encouraging innovation, and in the long term, their economies may dwarf ours due to our failing system.
All property rights, be they Intellectual or Physical property, exist to encourage investment. No one "naturally" owns anything, though many people have been brainwashed into thinking that is the case.
I don't know which way is best. It seems the Stalinist system doesn't work well, and the US system has some SERIOUS problems which require periodic correction (trust-busting and such).
My advice: Watch the world economies, and don't be afraid to immigrate if you see one system collapsing and another rising. Of course, you should avoid contributing to economies in countries which deny fundamental human rights (China, Iran, etc.) but don't let nationalism blind you to economic realities.
My first idea post (Score:3, Interesting)
I won't disclose how long ago I thought of this, but in the many years since I have not ever seen it done anywhere. So either it's a new idea, or it really doesn't work, or I just haven't looked around enough.
My idea is a simple syncronous motor without a controller that will run at double speed (6000 RPM at 50 Hz, 7200 RPM at 60 Hz). The idea is to construct the stator with 3-phase windings just like a normal syncronous motor. However, for the rotor, replace the permanent magnets with 3-phase windings powered by AC current coupled to the rotor through 4 slip rings. Wire the rotor windings so the rotating magnetic field turns in the opposite direction of the intended rotation and the stator field rotation. For proper startup, use 12 distinct windings organized as 6 pairs at opposite sides. Half of the windings will be wired to line-to-neutral power connections and the other half will be wired for 1.732 times the voltage and wired to line-to-line power connections. This should give a reasonably uniform magnetic field.
Now, how do I get this tagged?
Re: (Score:2)
And the fair value is a concept very difficult to define like you said