Hi there, here are some slightly related patent question.
I was asked the other day by a local inventor about how one can release designs into the public domain without fear of another company patenting the invention and preventing others from exploiting it later on. After a little digging, I was pointed to the whole white paper industry. As I understand it patents are based on first publication and the normal format is a a white paper that consitutes publication and is sufficient to establish priority of invention for the publisher. This establishes the legal priority of the idea/design for the inventor and would be enough to defeat a later patent application by an imititator should they apply. Although patent offices prefer to have an actual patent application as proof of priority a white paper publication should be enough. Understandably the whole patent validation and search business is patchy at best as seen by the peertopatent[1] initiative that seeks to offload some of the work of patent validation from the patent office into the community. Should I advise the inventor to publish his invention/design under an open content license as a white paper? Is there an advantage in making a patent application over publishing a white paper? Is there an accepted format for patents that will not be enforced by the inventor? Is there an accepted format for stating that white papers will not generate patents, but prevent others from doing so? Are white papers supposed to be published in journals or does a url consitutute publication? What steps should he take to make sure that patent offices are aware of his paper so that they will not be patentable in future? Are there any services or meta data schemas that specifically aid white paper publishers in categorising work in ways that are easily integratable with patent office searches? Would an online journal of open designs be useful or does something like it exist already? oops - that's alot of questions. any fragments much appreciated. cheers /julian [1] http://www.peertopatent.org/ On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 10:21:38PM +0200, Jonathan Gray wrote: > Shame its only free as in beer :-) > > -------- Original Message ------- > > A little while ago I emailed you to let you know about a new patent > searching site, http://www.SumoBrain.com. I thought the site might be > useful to your readers given > http://www.okfn.org/open%20knowledge%20trail/think_again/. > > I wanted to let you know that since that time SumoBrain has gone from > being a subscription-based service to being a free service. > > The features it offers are unprecedented for free patent searching > (e.g., world patent searching, alerts, collaboration tools, bulk PDF > downloading). If you already linked to it or wrote anything about it, I > just wanted to let you know that you might want to update your > information to let people know that it is now free. > > Sincerely, > James > > > _______________________________________________ > okfn-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss > _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
