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patent commons?
patent commons?
Posted Nov 4, 2003 7:15 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (subscriber, #421)Parent article: IP lawyer turns patent foe, gets grant funding
[...] establish a patent commons through which patents are made available to the public on favorable terms.
Sigh... Why do we keep hearing this idea? If you want to make an idea available to the public, just publish it; then it can't be patented (in theory). There are even ways to submit ideas to the patent office directly to make sure they will be included in the prior-art database, but it costs $100-$200, I believe. Compare that to the cost of getting a patent, which typically runs into thousands of dollars, at least.
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patent commons?
Posted Nov 4, 2003 7:18 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (subscriber, #421) [Link]
Unless what they mean is to convince companies to donate their patents to the public, which would be nice except that it's hard to believe it will happen.
patent commons?
Posted Nov 4, 2003 8:19 UTC (Tue) by TheOneKEA (subscriber, #615) [Link]
You never know. If these folks know what they're doing and they make it pretty clear to the patent holders that they would be better off donating the patent to the public, they might just do it.
patent commons?
Posted Nov 4, 2003 11:20 UTC (Tue) by sanjoy (subscriber, #5026) [Link]
Patent commons could have benefits like the GPL ("tough love" rather the "free love" of BSD licenses).Companies or members of the public could license patents from the commons as long as derivative patents go into the pool, on the same terms. The commons would grow, as has the pool of GPL software, increasing the benefit to agree to its terms.
Companies already make such arrangements privately. AT&T and IBM would license their patent portfolios to each other. Each had large enough portfolios that it was worth it to the other. The deal also meant that outsiders had to compete against the combined patent pool, so had no chance (as an example of how patents "promote" innovation, long ago AT&T used the patents system to delay the development of radio). A useful and legal anti-competition tactic.
During World War 2, Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon) and I.G. Farben of Nazi fame used patent pools to divide up world markets in synthetic rubber and high-octane aviation gasoline, to the detriment of the US war effort. The US government could do little about it since it needed Standard's gasoline and oil for the war (Standard had the government over a barrel).
Probably the public would be better off with no patents at all, as it would be with no copyright at all (except perhaps the requirement to give credit). However, as long as copyright exists, the GPL is useful; and as long as patents exist, patent commons will be useful.
patent commons?
Posted Nov 4, 2003 16:05 UTC (Tue) by gnb (subscriber, #5132) [Link]
>If you want to make an idea available to the public, just publish it; then it can't be>patented (in theory).
But of course in practice it can and will be, since the notion of prior art is basically
lost on the US Patent Office. And once that happens most people/companies won't
have the resources to challenge it.
patent commons?
Posted Nov 4, 2003 19:01 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]
I've read that a patent examiner only gets about 25 working hours, tops, to examine a patent, as they don't have the staffing to handle the volume of patent applications. What this means is that when they check "prior art" they mainly check prior patents.
May be a good move
Posted Nov 4, 2003 19:09 UTC (Tue) by libra (guest, #2515) [Link]
All the discussion here reminds me a comment I posted here more thant a month ago. You can read it somewhere there : http://lwn.net/Articles/50443/ though you may find it rather long.I just hope that what is going on now will have the positive effects I was expecting when I wrote my little contribution.