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Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain

arstechnica.com

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Re: Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain

#201

Post by dpark »

Nomentatus wrote: post #200
monochromatic wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior art has to be well known? Please tell me what court said that.

I have in mind a case noted by the ipwatchdog site, I believe. The following isn't the case I had in mind, which was more extreme still, and much more recent, but here's a start: A reference “is ‘publicly accessible’ upon a satisfactory showing that [the reference] has been disseminated or otherwise made available to the extent that persons interested and ordinarily skilled in the subject matter or art exercising rea…

Sure. Essentially the courts are affirming that the system is “first to file” and not “first to invent”. You cannot quietly invent something and then claim ownership after someone else patents the same idea. If prior art could be private, then the system would still be de facto “first to invent”.

How well known something must be is obviously going to be subject to interpretation. If you tell your co-worker at the bar, that’s probably not sufficient. If you publish on your blog that no one knows about, that’s probably also not sufficient. If you publish in a journal, that probably is more than sufficient. If you cannot reasonably claim that the other inventor should have been able to find your prior art, then the courts will rule against you.

Re: Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain

#202

Post by wowtip »

djsumdog wrote: post #130

I wish more of the world would take New Zealand's stance. Software patents are banned in that country. The US/EU should really go a similar route.

Remember the fights against software patents in the early 2000s? How corporations said they needed them, and they would not be abused.

Fast forward 15 years and we see all fears have come true. Big corporations hoard software patents, which are used to stifle competition and extort money from companies using free software.

Worth keeping in mind when fighting for net neutrality and other issues where corporations make promises when trying to limit the freedom of the public.

Re: Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain

#203

Post by belorn »

beefman wrote: post #84
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #63

This is a reason for using [L]GPL: explicit patent protection. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.en.html https://fsfe.org/campaigns/gplv3/patents-and-gplv3.en.html#E...

Had Duda released his code under GPLv3, he would have quit his own patent claims, not prevented Google from asserting theirs. In general, there is no way to prevent patent claims on your work other than to defensively patent every conceivable application of it. That is why all major corporations have large portfolios of such patents.

In theory one should not need to defensively patent anything that is published openly since the patent office should not grant any patents for ideas which has already been published. It is only if we accept that the patent office is utterly broken and do not check for prior art that defensively patent every conceivable application of public released work is a good idea.

Re: Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain

#204

Post by [deleted] »

falcor84 wrote: post #197
Nomentatus wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False. A recent U.S. decision holds that such a disclosure must be well known to practitioners of the art, not just known to a few! Publication is no longer sufficient. You do have to lie and say you thought of it independently; something impossible to disprove. The number of people who'd lie for big money is... innumerable. You can patent ideas thousands of years old - if they're not well known to practitioners.

Could you please link to this decision?

[deleted]

Re: Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain

#205

Post by powturbo »

allenz wrote: post #129
xfs wrote: post #108

Read this reaction from xiphmont: https://xiphmont.dreamwidth.org/84214.html It paints a quite different picture.

This comes off as rather dismissive. Xiphmont simultaneously claims that Jarek's work is useless ("the performance claims just don't hold up") and that Google needs a defensive patent on it. As someone on encode.ru pointed out, "if Google genuinely wanted this as a defensive patent, then the right approach is to work with Jarek and pay for him to file a patent on ANS itself blocking as many of the spin-off patents as…

> "the performance claims just don't hold up"

see now the fatcs in https://sites.google.com/site/powturbo/entropy-coder and how rANS based entropy coder outperforms the current AOMedia AV1 entropy coder by 7 times.

Re: Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain

#206

Post by rhizome »

jonathanyc wrote: post #174
rhizome wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean the "only" that's followed by "not by copyright?"

Yes, an almost universal trait of human languages is that they include redundancies for error correction. Reread the post the OP is replying to and then read the OP’s comment.

Thanks, Sheldon.

Re: Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain

#207

Post by tabtab »

dd36 wrote: post #134
djsumdog wrote: post #130

I wish more of the world would take New Zealand's stance. Software patents are banned in that country. The US/EU should really go a similar route.

It’s probably too late. Too many entrenched interests and public interest groups don’t have resources.

It will probably only change if non-software-patent countries start kicking our economic butts. THEN policy makers will take notice.

Re: Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain

#208

Post by bdowling »

Nomentatus wrote: post #187
bdowling wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A public disclosure by a first inventor prevents a later inventor from receiving a patent on the same invention. Even if that publication happened only one day before you file your application and you had no chance to be influenced by it at all, you will not get a patent (or it will be held invalid). Saying that first-to-file means a non-inventor can lawfully obtain a patent is also wrong. It seems to imply that a ne…

False. A recent U.S. decision holds that such a disclosure must be well known to practitioners of the art, not just known to a few! Publication is no longer sufficient. You do have to lie and say you thought of it independently; something impossible to disprove. The number of people who'd lie for big money is... innumerable. You can patent ideas thousands of years old - if they're not well known to practitioners.

You're right that any publication will not be sufficient. A publication needs to be discoverable by the practitioners of the relevant art. However, it does not need to be well-known to them, nor does it need to be actually known by any of them. It only needs to be reasonably discoverable.

As for obtaining a patent by fraud, no comment.

Re: Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain

#209

Post by jeffreyrogers »

Nomentatus wrote: post #191
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just publish your invention and how to make it if you want it to be part of the prior art. Then, in theory, the patent examiners should find it when examining patents. Of course, making sure they actually find the relevant prior art is part of the problem.

False. Publication is no longer enough, the prior art or publication has to be sufficiently well known to practitioners, now. Recent U.S. decision.

Do you have a source for this?

Re: Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain

#210

Post by bdowling »

bch wrote: post #186
bdowling wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Patents grant a monopoly for a limited time and there is no compulsory licensing regime for patents. Many patent-owners do license their inventions, but others don't.

I think we’re saying the same thing. The licensing isn’t compulsory, but if ONE CHOOSES to license liberally, those are the terms of use. A benevolent actor could patent a thing, freely license, and head off another actor that would patent-and-lock-down.

It's not necessary to spend the money to obtain a patent in order to prevent others from patenting an invention. All you need to do is make the invention available by publishing it somewhere discoverable by the relevant public. The publication doesn't need to be in an academic journal either. A recent case found that a message on Usenet was sufficiently public because Usenet is organized hierarchically into newsgroups on various topics. A blog post would also probably suffice, so long as it's indexed by a search engine.
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