Open Source Patent Donations?

patspam writes "As a software engineer I come up with patentable ideas every now and then, ideas which I'm not interested in pursuing myself but which I'd like to keep out of the hands of private entities/patent trolls in my own personal effort to defeat software patents. Should I patent the ideas and donate them to some sort of open source foundation? Or just blog about the ideas so that the 'prior art' exists in the public domain? What's your strategy for fighting against restrictive software patents?"

As far as US is concerned

[hansraj]

you could just blog since the system is not first to file but first to invent. Moreover it also saves you patent fees that you would have to pay if you actually try getting a patent.

BEWARE THE LINK

[IBBoard]

I've not clicked the link, but it's another Yahoo redirect link to an on.nimp.org address. Proceed with caution/insanity.

Establishing Prior Art

[codegen]

I publish to a peer reviewed academic journal or conference. In most
of the conferences I'm involved in, we are always looking for
more industrial contributions.

Creating "Prior Art."

[mlwmohawk]

To establish prior art you need to publish. The problem is that magazines and journals are fairly selective about content because they have to pay or the content has to fit their market or be interesting in some way. Then there is credibility, if you write an article about recommendations or motor control methodology, something you've done as a hobby project, a magazine or journal may not choose to publish because it can not properly verify the content.

We need to create an "on-line" and perhaps paper "journal" that will accept all technical submissions and publish them in a way that fits the USPTO's definition of "published" to establish prior art. That way *all* ideas get covered easily.

I've written a lot of articles and only been published a few times, its hard to get published. There are lots of would be authors out there and a lot of subject matter being written about.

publish

[nguy]

You need to publish your invention in an archival format. Write it up for Dr. Dobbs or some other magazine.

Publishing it on the Internet is not enough; it doesn't count as prior art.

Even if you publish in an archival format, companies will often still patent almost the same thing and then worry about fighting it out in court. There are all sorts of ways of basically invalidating your publication for the purpose of counting as prior art, but it's still the best chance you have.

Patenting is pretty hopeless: it's enormously expensive, and trying to enforce a patent is even more costly. Patents are not useful for inventors or open source, they are only useful as legal ammunition for big companies and law firms to play games with.

Honest opinion?

[dpx420]

Sell out. Patenting the ideas is going to cost you time and money, whereas if they are truly worth the attention of the 'evil corporations' you stand to make a substantial gains from making them available to a company with the required resources to put them to use. Around here a higher than average subset adhere to strange personal religions that financial benefit from your own ingenuity is somehow immoral, and that the world is better off if real companies can't use these ideas and make them a practical reality (but that's ok, some guy sitting in his parents basement will knock off a buggy implementation in 10 years time, for freeeeeee man). You decide which of these outcomes you would rather see.

There are only small number of people for which simply blogging their ideas would:
a.) get them taken seriously, or even noticed at all,
b.) be worthwhile for them personally in terms of personal reputation and the longer term benefits of that.
Those are people who are already recognised within specific (usually comparatively small) technical communities, often with freelance careers for which reputation is important. I'm going to guess that you are not in this position because all this would be obvious to you otherwise. It is also rather naive to think that articles simply posted on a web page will stand up as prior art in courtroom against competent lawyers. This is simply pragmatism.

I'm going to make another assumption, that you are posting this question out of a genuine uncertainty of how to reap the results of your own creativeness (which is something that anyone deserves). If you are simply seeking group endorsement (perhaps subconsciously) then my reply probably hasn't been of much help to you.

Re:Worthless advice, here's why.

[Anonymous Coward]

So post a blank postcard with your address on it. Years later, write someone elses invention/copyrighted work on the postcard. Still doesn't prove anything.

Re:As far as US is concerned

[thegrassyknowl]

you could just blog since the system is not first to file but first to invent.

Since when has that pesky little thing called 'prior art' stopped the patent office granting patents, and since when has it stopped the legal system upholding those patents when they are used to sue the pants off the original inventor or anyone who is using his invention free of charge?

Re:As far as US is concerned

[Instine]

"not abandoned, suppressed, or concealed"

Do you think thats an inclusive or an exclusive or?

build a prototype

[FudRucker]

build a prototype version .0.1 with well known friends of GNU/GPL and get it licensed under the GNU/GPL-3 and release it on SourceForge, then you know it is anchored somewhere...

Re:Worthless advice, here's why.

[asuffield]

And if you want to accomplish something along those lines (proving that you had a document on a certain date) then that is precisely why notaries public exist in the first place. Take whatever it is along to your local notary and pay them their fee. In the eyes of the law, the document has now been proven to exist in your possession on that date. Unlike the ridiculous games with envelopes that you see in the movies, it actually works.

Re:Some considerations

[n3tcat]

I thought too much detail would in effect give the patent troll a "way out" as they can then just change one of the many details and become unique.

Those solutions wont work

[shaitand]

Apparently people still don't understand. You can patent an invention, you can copyright a tangible representation of an idea, but you can not protect an idea through any IP method.

Software is really a representation of an idea and should be copyrighted, not patented. Since patents are granted as if software were an invention you do still actually have to make the invention to qualify for a patent. I can scream my idea from the heavens all day long and that doesn't qualify as prior art, only implementing the idea would qualify as prior art.