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Sure, the existence of the post could prove you thought of it first, but that doesn't prove that the idea was stolen from there nor does it pay for a lawyer...
Maybe I'm missing something, but if I come up with a great idea and have any inkling that it may be patentable, why would I want to post the idea publicly before trying to patent it? Wouldn't that open it up to the possibility of theft? Sure, the existence of the post could prove you thought of it first, but that doesn't prove that the idea was stolen from there nor does it pay for a lawyer...
Once filed, patents are up for discussion.
Really cool! One idea-- it would be awesome if I could set up an account with a list of topics I have experience in (maybe just pulled from linkedin?), and be automatically notified when an application relevant to my knowledge is submitted. I bet there would be thousands of people happy to chime in once a week / month when a patent in a specific field they have experience in was submitted. It would be a great way to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're all protected by patents. All of them. I can pretty much guarantee you that any of IBM, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Intellectual Ventures, and many others have sufficient patent coverage to be able to sue you for anything you could possibly build that involves software in any way. [edited to scope it to software]
You do realize that the world is bigger than just software development?
http://pyvideo.org/video/425/pycon-2011--how-to-kill-a-patent-with-python
Part I (5 mins): The USPTO as a data source.* The full-text of each patent is available from the USPTO (and now from Google.) What does this data look like? How can it be harvested and normalized to create data structures that we can work with?
Part II (15 mins, in two parts):* Once the patents have been cleaned and normalized, they can be turned into data structures that we can use to evaluate their relationship to other documents. This is done in two ways - by modeling each patent as a document vector and a graph node.
Part IIA (7 mins): Patents as document vectors.* Once we have a patent as a data structure, we can treat the patent as a vector in an n-dimensional space. In moving from a document into a vector space, we will touch on normalization, stemming, TF/IDF, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA).
Part IIB (7 mins): Patents as technology graphs.* This will show building graph structures using the connections between patents - both the built-in connections in the patents themselves as well as the connections discovered while working with the patents as vectors. We apply some social network analysis to partition the patent graph and find other documents in the same technology space.
Part III (5 mins): What have we built?* Now that we have done all this analysis, we can see some interesting things about the patent database as a whole. How does the patent database act as a map to the world of technology? And how has this helped with the original problem - finding better prior art?Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many teacups we talkin here? In 2011 there were about 500K utility patent applications: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.htm Many of those are not software related. There are about 1.3M programmers in the US alone: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/19720/where-c... So 20 teacups each to have each patent looked over 10 times? Sounds doable to me.
some patents take days to review - some have to be reviewed in context with other patents etc. So maybe 200 teacups each but the direction is definitely right.
I'm not doing anything close to as good a job as a patent examiner would do, but with about an hour of work I (hopefully) was able to start pointing to some prior art that could get an examiner quickly up to speed on what the state of the art is.
I agree the amount of work involved to comprehensively invalidate a patent would be days - hopefully a group can do the same with shorter time contributions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you're submitting a patent application you are required to have done a prior art search and list found prior art. What effect do you think this would have on small inventors?
this is a current requirement for everybody submitting a patent application
I really wonder how it's supposed to work with the amount of patents granted nowadays. Say you come up with a new product, can you really be expected to go and read all pending patents in existence to verify you're not infringing? It's practically impossible, so I suppose it's mostly fingers crossed that you won't get sued.
1) An additional "this patent is so bad the applicant deserves to be slapped," and a meaningful penalty for submitting atrocious patents (scaled to be meaningful based on who is submitting it).
2) Some compensation for those who are doing a good job providing prior art. This doesn't have to be financial - improving professional reputation would probably be enough, but that's not really going to happen if it's relatively few people on the site. Could we come up with a way of increasing the exposure of contributers (when they want it)?
Maybe I'm missing something, but if I come up with a great idea and have any inkling that it may be patentable, why would I want to post the idea publicly before trying to patent it? Wouldn't that open it up to the possibility of theft? Sure, the existence of the post could prove you thought of it first, but that doesn't prove that the idea was stolen from there nor does it pay for a lawyer...
> In other words, as of September 16, the USPTO is required to accept submissions from the public of prior art.
This is for third parties to weigh in on the patentability of an idea, not for the person filing the patent.