Subj : Re: Software Patents To : comp.programming From : rem642b Date : Mon Jul 11 2005 07:13 am > From: Peter Ammon > patents are an incentive to research and invest in novel approaches > to problems. Why spend any effort researching the best approach if > competitors can copy it immediately? You're mixing up patents and copyrights. It's a copyright which protects you from somebody copying what you have. Patents are much stronger, whereby if what you invented is so obvious to anyone in the field that somebody else invents the same thing as a solution to the same problem about the same time you did, they are forbidden from selling their own invention because you got dibs on it. I think the patent office should publish a list of problems that currently pending patents claim to solve, and invite anyone anywhere in the world to see if they can find solutions. If other people come up with essentially the same solution as the patent applicant, then the patent application is denied. But if given three months or so after the list appears in comp.programming and still none of the posted responses are anything like the patent application, and in fact all are seriously inferior, then the application is granted as superior to any prior art. I'm still pissed that after I invented a data-compression method in early 1970, except it wasn't practical, and for years all the experts said it would be impossible to ever make it practical, it's simply not mathematically possible, but then in 1978 I finally found a data-processing trick to make it practical, and spent a year trying to get a patent on my VERY NON-OBVIOUS method, but couldn't because the patent office wasn't granting patents except for the very one that they granted to IBM a few years previously in a mistaken deviation from their usual policy, then a few years later somebody else solved the same problem but in a much inferior way, not really practical as mine was, basically a crockpot method they came up with, something that has a failure mode that my better method was immune from, and also they used a stupid name for their invention that misleads us as to how it works (sort of like the spam I got yesterday for "Student loans" but which turned out to be about protection from creditors, a clear violation of the CAN-SPAM law), but they were granted a patent, which I read about in Dr. Dobbs Journal a few years later, whereupon I saw their stupid algorithm for the first time. > I agree that software patents are abused in the United States, and > companies that do nothing save accumulate IP for litigation are legal > and economic parasites. But this seems to me to be a symptom of a > patent office that grants overly broad or obvious patents. If patents > were confined to legitimately original inventions that took significant > work to develop, I think they'd be a positive thing. The US Patent Office has been seriously braindamaged in their specific decisions, especially as you point out regarding obvious solutions to problems, but also in many cases where prior art is already publically posted on the InterNet but the idiots working at the patent office are too stupid to spend 5 minutes doing a Google search to discover it. If those two *major* problems were removed, then my objections would be less vehement. Hmm, noticing that I'm using the same language to describe patents and to describe fixing the US patent office, my mind got to work, and I think I can get a patent on my idea for fixing the problem with the patent office! It must be non-obvious, the idea of using Google to search for prior art, since in all the years of Yahoo first and now Google the people working in the field never thought of doing that. Has anybody else before me suggested the patent office search Google for prior art, or am I the first to post that suggestion? Hmmm, let me do a Google search myself ... http://www.google.se/groups?selm=RdCdnbZ4AN_n4fffRVn-jA%40rcn.net (a person doing such a search himself, but not any suggestion that the US Patent Office should do same, so that's not prior art for my invention) Aha, found what I need: http://www.google.se/groups?selm=29d7c061.0410200917.3f9fd7dc%4 0posting.google.com which claims: there was no prior record of software technology from 1940 to 1995, upon which to search for prior art. So prior art in patent research is what he said, nothing in Google etc. that would help research a patent application, so my idea that Google really *can* be useful in such a patent search is a new idea which isn't obvious to others on the net. I have specific reasons why I believe what he posted, the prior art, is wrong, and my new invention is correct, but I'll keep it confidential until after my European patent application is filed (in USA I have one year after I publish my detailed design before I have to file, but in Europe I need to file *before* any public disclosure, so you guys will have to either meet me in person and sign a non-disclosure agreement, or wait until I have enough money to pay for a lawyer to help me file a patent application and the Sahara freezes over). Aha!! See this: http://www.google.se/groups?selm=ca1ksh%24prs%241%40news.netpower.no the USPTO does not do any research or checking of prior art of any sort - they simple ask the applicant if there has been any prior art. So it seems that I can broaden my claim: Not only is searching Google a novel idea, but *any* search whatsoever conducted by the US Patent Office is a novel idea. I hereby make that claim now and have dibs on any patent that may result. .