Open Source Patent Donations? 185
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:As far as US is concerned (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Prior art argument may need to be more robust (Score:2)
You have two choices regarding your patentable ideas:
1. Fully implement your ideas in a complete, functional application and put as much effort as pos
Perfect solution to the problem, buy the patents (Score:2)
Re:As far as US is concerned (Score:4, Informative)
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless--
(g)(2) before such person's invention thereof, the invention was made in this country by another inventor who had not abandoned, suppressed, or concealed it. In determining priority of invention under this subsection, there shall be considered not only the respective dates of conception and reduction to practice of the invention, but also the reasonable diligence of one who was first to conceive and last to reduce to practice, from a time prior to conception by the other. (Emphasis added)
You need to actively work on it and have reduced it to practice (the latter which is satisfied by filing a patent application). Your triumphant opening of the envelope might garner you bragging rights, but no destructive effect on the patent rights of others.
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Do you think thats an inclusive or an exclusive or?
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Re:As far as US is concerned (Score:5, Funny)
No.
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I know it's poor form to quote wikipedia but take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Cruel_and_unusual_punishments [wikipedia.org] - a punishment has to be both cruel and unusual to be automatically unconstitutional.
As you said, it's off topic but Magna Carta is no longer of much legal status. The only significant section left in the law in England is:
"NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or b
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However, I think, translating from English to C, the above is roughly equivalent to:
bool ElligibleForPatent( const patent_t * x)
{
if (!abandoned(x) && !suppressed(x) && !concealed(x))
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Wait, so we can freely patent ideas/inventions from other countries?
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If that's what you're asserting, then you're wrong. There's a court case about prior art, which ruled something to the effect that prior art is anything that is accessible by the public (i.e. a PhD dissertation available through a public university library only needs to be available for access, and you do not need to prove that someone a
Why spelling matters (Score:2)
Re:As far as US is concerned (Score:4, Informative)
The parent is flat out wrong. The USPTO, or a court, can use a publication under 102(b) or 102(e) to show that an invention is not novel. Regardless of the status of the a patent on the prior art. 102(g) is related to if an inventor is trying to get a patent on his invention, not whether a publication can be used against another as prior art.
Perhaps I should explain. If there exists a publication describing the subject of a patent application and that publication was published more than one year prior to the application (also applies to if the subject of the patent was in public use in the US or for sale in the US), it is an absolute bar to the patent. 35 USC Section 102(b).
Blogging about an invention is a publication and can be used to destroy novelty for further inventors. The problem is that the USPTO is less likely to find your art than if it is an issued patent or an application.
If the As a suggestion to the original post, maybe a provisional application would meet your desire:
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/provapp.htm [uspto.gov]
Provisional applications are published after 18 months, and if the application matures into an issued patent, it will count as art from the day it was filed. You still have to meet some of the more stringent requirements though, so this may not be the right solution. Also, if you don't intend to get a patent on the idea, it is better to publish something as well as file the provisional. That way there is a publication farther back in time than just the publication of the application that will never mature into an issued patent.
But as I said before, the parent is wrong and misunderstands the import of 102(g). The designation of informative on that post is misplaced.
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(a) the invention was known or used by others in this country, or patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country , before the invention thereof by the applicant for patent, or,
So publish the idea on the internet and no one can steal it and patent it out from underneath you.
Sure they can apply the idea, but they can n
Re:As far as US is concerned (Score:4, Informative)
Most postal services have absolutely no problem with letting you send an empty, open envelope to yourself; after which you have an open, registered and dated empty envelope which you can later fill with a pre-dated proof of invention and seal.
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Worthless advice, here's why. (Score:5, Informative)
This trick works with anything else, too, so it worthless advice.
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We are not talking about copyright though--we're talking about patents. I do agree that it is silly posting yourself a copy of "whatever"... better just to publish the thing and claim the original art (read: others after you will have to battle with you prior art--it's not good if the prior art is sealed in a vault. Is it?)
Re:Worthless advice, here's why. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not completely worthless.
Say for example, your name is Rikki, and you have this number you don't want to lose.
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Obviously if you put the stamp on the front, you have no way of proving that you didn't just mail an unsealed envelope and stuff the papers in there after the fact. It's only of any use if you put the stamp on the back.
However, this is all a moot point becau
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B) There may be a correlation between people who believe the mailing system works, and people who don't plan ahead. Both require not really thinking the whole situation through.
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All you'll have is proof you posted an envelope. No proof it was sealed or had anything it it when you did so. This is only useful for stamp collectors collecting first day covers.
legal advice (Score:4, Funny)
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When you have a serious problem, you hire a professional in that field. People don't go to lawyers when they want code, why should they go to coders when they want legal help?
Establishing Prior Art (Score:5, Insightful)
of the conferences I'm involved in, we are always looking for
more industrial contributions.
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sorry mate, somebody beat you to it. (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.totallyabsurd.com/toiletsnorkel.htm [totallyabsurd.com]
Some considerations (Score:5, Informative)
If you blog it, the content may get lost. Is it possible for you to (crudely) implement your ideas and put that code on sourceforge or some other repository, together with a description. In the comments of the code you can elaborate on things not implemented. In such a repository, the ideas may be longer lived, and more people may see it (and if necessary bring it to the attention of a patent office).
Bert
Patent agent
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And rightly so. Because that "first, vague claim" is exactly what is being patented. (Actually, there may be several main claims in a patent.) It is usually the only thing you have to read in a patent, if you want to find out if something is patented.
The sub claims have two purposes:
Patent Commons vs Prior Art (Score:3, Interesting)
Prior Art helps block patents in general, but as we saw with the Amazon shopping cart patent it can take years and effort (from New Zealanders) to remove them.
So Patent Commons is more powerful, but it involves the patent submission process, and it can be costly. I suggest the patent commons if you're got the resources.
(I am not a lawyer)
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I absolutely agree that a donated patent can be quite useful -- but keep in mind that it's a sizable donation that *might* be valueless if there's some
USPTO FEES (Score:2)
IANAL, and this is not advice. But it may help you understand some options.
The costs you quote are for paying someone else to write, file, and handle all correspondence with the patent office. Do it yourself and it's around $500 to file (basic utility filing). Get fancy, deal with a lot of responses to the patent office and it can get a bit more expensive. Have the patent allowed and pay for it to be issued is $720.
Creating "Prior Art." (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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When I worked in biotech (this was in the UK in 2000-2003) our lab books, countersigned regularly by a senior academic and archived in the institute library were considered a good enough defense against subsequent US patent applications. I don't know if this was ever tested.
I agree there should be repositories for articles that are not necessarily of enough immediacy, impact or quality for publication, but still contain potentially valuable IP. I wouldn't be surprised if such a thing already exists. Na
Re:Creating "Prior Art." (Score:5, Informative)
This is highly dependent on the journal. In the case of trade journals, a lot of them are actually dying for "real" articles buried in their mass of ads, and ads thinly disguised as articles, to attract readership. In the past I have submitted many "test cases" to a trade rag on electronics test and all of them were published without question. In some cases they were patentable ideas I specifically wanted to make public domain, because it wasn't worth it to me to go through the patent expense but I also didn't want to be prevented from using them in the future. As a side effect I became well-known in the field, very helpful for my consulting work.
On the other hand, I have submitted a couple of ideas to the "Design Ideas" section of EDN magazine. Both were rejected, even though I thought they were reasonable. I think the problem there is simply that the column is very popular and they have more submissions than they can publish, so it depends on the whim of the editor that day.
Anyway it depends on the journal. I guess my point is that if you're going to write it up anyway, might as well submit it and see what happens, doesn't cost anything. If it does get published, you'll make a name for yourself and have something for your CV, as well as establishing prior art. For best results find a little known or start-up trade rag in the field that's 90% ads. And if it doesn't get published, you'll still have your write-up for some on-line thing as you suggested.
publish (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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There's a bunch of established ways of publishing something so that it counts reliably as prior art. Use one of them. Doing anything else is unnecessarily risky.
(You seem to assume that public accessibility and an established publication date are sufficient to establish prior art. That is incorrect: there are additional requi
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I can't believe that posters here are taking the original poster seriously as he is basically asking for advice on how to create submarine patents for the open source community. Hey folks, when did the ends start justifying the means?
IMHO, criticizing the patent system when for profit corporations abuse it yet encouraging the same abuse when it is done by open source foundations shows a lack of integrity. Wake up, people!
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I'm not sure I follow this. The "open source community", as far as I can tell, isn't a "person" in any legal sense, and can't sue or be sued. However, I am a "person", and I can be sued. What the OP was talking about was publishing his own ideas in such a way that a corporation can't later claim to own those ideas and sue him for
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Oh, I misunderstood his intentions. Mea culpa. I thought that he was interested in going after companies that used his ideas. If all he wants is to protect himself from being sued, then applying for a patent won't help. IANAL but it is my understanding that a patent is an offensive rights weapon. It has no defensive component to it. Just because you already have a patent on an idea can't keep you from being sued for using that idea. All that a patent does is give you some basis for suing someone else.
In
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So the 3-D "printing" idea I just published on slashdot [slashdot.org] won't count?
Using blogs and tags (Score:2)
A while back I blogged on using tags and blogs as a standard mechanism for publication [blogspot.com]. Now the point of this is that while the patent act says published it doesn't specify the publication type it just says that the other people filing could have obtained the information from it and that others will have read it.
To me this is a classic case where the internet has over taken the current laws to give us a much cheaper and simpler way of doing this.
The us is currently "reforming" its patent laws (Score:2, Interesting)
From what little i've tracked on it, theyre "reforming" the patent system by handing it even more firmly to trolls:
e.g.:
switching to first to file
putting severe restrictions on who has standing to challenge a patent
putting severe restrictions on the period during which it may be challenged before it can never be invalidated period.
(goodbye EFF patent busting campaign anyone?)
I'm sure more "reforms" have and will be added to
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If it is the Patent Reform Act of 2007 (still going through) that you're talking about, it also expands protections for prior-use, and allows unaffiliated 3rd parties to petition for patent cancelation. So it's definitely not all bad. It still doesn't solve the examiner c
The nature of software does not support the.... (Score:3, Funny)
What is universally accepted as not being patentable:
abstract ideas,
natural law
physical phenomenon
Mathematical algorithms as often added to this but in essence are included in the three primary.
The reason these are so universally accepted as not being patentable is that its near impossible to enforce patents against such things.
i.e. patent on gravity... you cannot use gravity without paying me royalties. But if you try and avoid gravity and walk off a cliff, paying royalties to some fool is teh least of your concerns.
How these applies to software:
Abstract ideas is rather obvious as software is the art of abstraction creation and use if anything is to be considered an art of abstraction.
Natural law is that abstraction is naturally a characteristic of human ability. Without it we could do nothing more than preform like any other animal incapable of developing technology, medicine, clothing, etc..
Physical phenomenon - thru the application of non-physical based abstraction we cause physical movement. If I tell you to go to the store and get a gallon of Mayfield milk, I have used abstract ideas communicated and received by you to act upon. If I/we did not have such ability, Mayfield milk would not exist to begin with.
Now many claim that software is in essence mathematical algorithms, but the basis of computer technology, the way it works, defines this constraint as a computer is based on "calculating" defined in terms of numbers (binary based). However, a radio station (fm or am) uses a carrier signal that cares not of what is carried over the signal, be it music, news, talk, noise, etc... And in the same way this basis of computing can as well be used as a carrier of abstraction far beyond math. Yet the carried its still inherently made up of the three primary things universally consider not being patentable.
This software patent fraud that has been going on has, as any attempt to contradict physics and nature, very bad effects, only due to the inherent nature of abstraction the skill of abstraction manipulation (human use and ability to deceive via abstraction manipulation) there are those who have remained fooled by such deception and unfortunately are in positions to indirectly tell people they have to walk off a cliff rather than recognize they are human with inherent abstraction skill and as a natural human characteristic it is to be expected and even encouraged to be what we are and make the best of it.
There is a way to not only prove all of this but in so doing build up a foundation of common knowledge solution direction of anyone "skilled in the field", non novel, and other aspects supporting non-patent-ability.
Humans can be deceptive for a long time and in an environment that even proves otherwise. This might be called the "human denial factor". Examples of this are well known, ie. Galileo and teh exoneration in the early 1990 of his views. But a lot of good such exoneration does Galileo now. Likewise the Hindu-Arabic decimal system took three hundred years to over come the far more mathematical limiting roman numeral system. Lets face it, only a fool would think nothing cannot have value (re: zero place holder), yet accountants using roman numerals were elite.. (sound familiar?)
Anyways, this idea of asking for funds/donations for to support software patents, regardless of the claimed intent of obtaining such patents, is supporting dishonesty and does not help to resolved the real issue of genuinely recognizing the honest nature of software.
for more see: Abstraction Physics [abstractionphysics.net]
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Personally I'd be up for one or the other: software patents would be acceptable if you couldn't copyright source code (and actually this would be pretty nice, since it would dump everything into the public domain in a relatively short period), but having both -- being able to copyright a particular implementa
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No I'm not. That's a completely separate issue. The source code is protected via copyright, and rightly so-- source code can be very creative.
However, that's completely beside my point: software is a machine. Once you admit that, it's obvious that it should also be patentable. Yes, it's a machine made of copyrighted text. Blueprints can be copyrighted and the device they describe can be patented. Software is no different.
Nature of patent office doesnt supprt patent sense (Score:2)
"lower chest diaphragm, expanding chest cavity...
But alas, I wouldn't have the assets to pursue the cases against the main violators, and they all are busy in their own court cases anyhow...
Send them to me (Score:5, Funny)
Bill G.
oh wait maybe I shouldn't have signed...
Honest opinion? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
OK so far...
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
build a prototype (Score:3, Insightful)
Publish it as a patent application (Score:5, Informative)
If I remember right, the US has a similar 'defensive' patent system for doing precisely this, but I would rather leave the details to someone else.
Re:Publish it as a patent application (Score:4, Informative)
You may think publishing it somewhere on the internet will be good enough until you realize it's not feasible to search every whackjob blog out there for claim language that you probably haven't reproduced. Also, archive.org doesn't actually archive a lot of these small, personal websites so it would be very difficult to reliably date the material.
open source patent pools and patent agents (Score:4, Informative)
I want to point out to everyone thinking about such a thing that you *do* *not* have to go to law school and become an attorney to file prepare/file/prosecute patent applications. All you have to do is pass the patent bar exam.
A law degree is not required to sit for the patent bar exam. All you need is a technical background (which most
If open source projects want to start filing a lot of patent applications, then having a project member become a patent agent would be a good idea.
I'm a first year law student, and I'm planning on taking the patent bar this summer.
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Interesting... other than law school, is there a way of finding out all these extremely specific word meanings?
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Produce a proof-of-concept (Score:2)
s
Reason being, if the technique is truly useful, it is more likely to be used in other projects and more the more projects
There is a better way (Score:2, Informative)
Software is properly part of the domain of copyrights, not patents. The very idea of patenting software is an abomination.
Just Say No.
IBM defensively published for 50 years; (Score:3, Informative)
IP.COM [ip.com] provides a way for you to publish your own work and add it to their searchable prior art database.
You may also be interested in the Patent Commons [patentcommons.org].
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Are you employed by someone? (Score:2, Informative)
Your employee probably already owns your ideas (Score:2, Informative)
Those solutions wont work (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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You seem to be confusing things. The US never abolished the requirement that you actually invent something. The US could no longer warehouse all the prototypes so they removed the requirement to send in your working prototype. That doesn't mean patents are now for unimplemented ideas.
'If, as a programmer, someone gave you a really good id
Don't blog it ,HalfBake it! (Score:2)
BEWARE THE LINK (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ban this troll, and some other advice! (Score:5, Informative)
I fell for the link in Firefox and their popup blocker didn't catch it, even though I'm running the latest version and I have auto-updates turned on. Good thing my speakers were turned off.
If it hits you:
1. It's easy enough to hit ctrl-alt-delete and bring up task manager to close the instance of your web browser if you run windows.
2. If you run linux you're probably knowledgeable enough to do a kill or kill -9.
3. The design of the nimp.org link actually helps you to close all of the web browser windows that pop up. The default behavior of windows is to "group similar taskbar buttons" together. You may have noticed this from the old tabless-web browsing when you had many instances of (gasp) IE or another browser open. Windows would annoyingly consolidate all of the windows into a single button on the taskbar. To switch between windows, you needed to click on the button and a drop-down menu would appear. So the nice thing about this grouping is that after enough nimp.org browser windows show up, windows consolidates them, and you can simply right click on the one button that represents the dozens of web browser windows. Select 'close' from the drop down menu and you're good. In fact, I keep the "group similar taskbar buttons" feature turned on just for trolls like the AC who posts the NIMP links. That, and tabbed browsing lets me run only one instance of a web browser instead of running one instance for each open web page. If you want to change the behavior, right click on the taskbar and select properties, and you'll see a menu with the 'group similar taskbar buttons' checkbox.
Just wanted to bring some attention to this instead of sweeping it under the rug, and also wanted to provide advice on how to close your browser easily if it hits you.
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(or like someone suggested here a while ago, to your hosts file)
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