Victory Lap for Ask Patents • Hacker News Board

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#11

Post by jasonkester » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 3:47 PM UTC

Pure Awesome. Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to existing software patents. There are plenty (~40k/year according to the article) of bad, obvious nonsense patents already out there. It'd be nice if there were a simple process to appeal and invalidate them with similar demonstrations of prior art and obviousness.

I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some Wikipedia-level-OCD focused on this site to stop the roughly 100% of bad applications for new software patents dead in their tracks. Imagine a 2014 where zero new software patents were issued.

EDIT: Incidentally, patentlyobvious.com is just a parked domain at the moment. It seems like the obvious choice for a place to host a site like this.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#12

Post by martin-adams » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 3:50 PM UTC

ajiang wrote: post #6

mixmax wrote: post #4

Congratulations to the stack exchange team for getting this going. It's an incredibly good idea, maybe you could patent it?

The patent trolls are already on it, patenting crowd-sourcing as a method of patent defense. This will inevitably result in the shut down of Ask Patents in a stunning fit of irony.

How about patenting the method of submitting a document to register a patent?

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#13

Post by ChuckMcM » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 3:53 PM UTC

This is an excellent result. I worried when the idea of helping the PTO uncover prior art would be controlled by the attorneys filing the patent (which is to say they would be a filter between the examiner and the external sources) but if the examiners are going directly to the source then this will really put a crimp in bad patents being issued.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#14

Post by silvestrov » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 3:57 PM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #11

Pure Awesome. Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to existing software patents. There are plenty (~40k/year according to the article) of bad, obvious nonsense patents already out there. It'd be nice if there were a simple process to appeal and invalidate them with similar demonstrations of prior art and obviousness. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some Wikipedia-level-OCD focused on this site to sto…

One thing missing in the patent system is that the patent seeker should pay a "fee" of $1000 if it is patentlyobvious that prior art exists.

That would enable "Amazon Mechanical Turk"-style killing of most patents with prior art.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#15

Post by geoka9 » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 3:59 PM UTC

silvestrov wrote: post #14

jasonkester wrote: post #11

Pure Awesome. Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to existing software patents. There are plenty (~40k/year according to the article) of bad, obvious nonsense patents already out there. It'd be nice if there were a simple process to appeal and invalidate them with similar demonstrations of prior art and obviousness. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some Wikipedia-level-OCD focused on this site to sto…

One thing missing in the patent system is that the patent seeker should pay a "fee" of $1000 if it is patentlyobvious that prior art exists. That would enable "Amazon Mechanical Turk"-style killing of most patents with prior art.

And the person who found prior art should get a cut of that fee. Crowdsourcing at its best.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#16

Post by skore » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 4:00 PM UTC

> Since patent examiners rely so much on keyword searches, when you submit your application, if you can change some of the keywords in your patent to be different than the words used everywhere else, you might get your patent through even when there’s blatant prior art, because by using weird, made-up words for things, you've made that prior art harder to find.

Wouldn't it also make sense to build up, maybe at the same time, a sort of "counter-thesaurus"?

As in: If you find prior art where the thesaurus method has been used to obscure terms in the patent, enter those as an example into a database. When another patent is looked up, individual terms that show up in the database have a "there are alternative terms for this" marker applied to them.

This might also make it a lot easier to make automatic search for prior art feasible again.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#17

Post by bqe » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 4:04 PM UTC

skore wrote: post #16

> Since patent examiners rely so much on keyword searches, when you submit your application, if you can change some of the keywords in your patent to be different than the words used everywhere else, you might get your patent through even when there’s blatant prior art, because by using weird, made-up words for things, you've made that prior art harder to find. Wouldn't it also make sense to build up, maybe at the sa…

I believe the tool you are looking for is a reverse dictionary. Several good ones already exist, but a tech-specific one would be helpful.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#18

Post by FurrBall » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 4:04 PM UTC

Nux wrote: post #8

Brilliant! Too bad however that so much energy needs to be wasted on SHIT like patents.

Absolutely. We should not have to waste time proving a patent is bad.

The root of the problem, the patent system itself need to be abolished.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#19

Post by tomjen3 » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 4:04 PM UTC

ajiang wrote: post #6

mixmax wrote: post #4

Congratulations to the stack exchange team for getting this going. It's an incredibly good idea, maybe you could patent it?

The patent trolls are already on it, patenting crowd-sourcing as a method of patent defense. This will inevitably result in the shut down of Ask Patents in a stunning fit of irony.

Unlikely. After all you have an entire site dedicated to finding prior art. I wouldn't want to get my patent killed over that.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#20

Post by mcantrell » Mon, Jul 22, 2013, 4:06 PM UTC

This is a great first step, but can we sustain this and keep more patents from being granted. Everything hinges on community involvement, so hopefully we can build and sustain a community that does this every day.