patent commons? [LWN.net]

patent commons?

Posted Nov 4, 2003 16:05 UTC (Tue) by gnb (subscriber, #5132)
In reply to: patent commons? by stevenj
Parent article: IP lawyer turns patent foe, gets grant funding

>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.

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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.