Be careful with this, according to the Debian patent FAQ prepared by Software Freedom Law Center (<a href="http://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq" rel="nofollow">http://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq</a>) you can get tainted by reading patents:<p><i>Unfortunately, U.S. patent law creates disincentives for searching through patents, even though one of the main justifications given for the patent system is that the patent teaches the public how to practice an invention that might otherwise be secret. Willful infringement subjects the infringer to enhanced damages when they are aware of the patent and intend to infringe, and reading patents increases the probability that subsequent infringement will be found to be willful. Moreover, we find that developers often assume that the patents they discover are broader in scope than they actually are, and thus such developers become overly or needlessly worried. If, despite this, you do intend to conduct a patent search, you should seek legal advice first.</i><p>That said, I'm happy to live and work in Europe where we don't need to deal with this crap.
What we really need is a crowd-sourcing platform for prior art research<p>Something where someone could submit a piece of prior art and for each of the claims in the patent describe how the prior art invalidates that claim. Plus some sort of discussion forum for people to discuss the prior art.<p>A few companies did launch in this space about a decade back (offering bounties that would be paid by companies getting sued over the patents), but no-one seems to have really succeeded in gaining traction.
I wish these quests for prior art didn't always happen after the damage was done.<p>The Patent Office itself should crowd-source the software community looking for prior art before a patent is issued in the first place.
On a small tangent, does someone maintain a graveyard of software patents as they become invalidated? Since there are lots of duplicate patents, this might be helpful when people need to defend against patent trolls.
I don't quite understand what's happening here. Could someone summarize it in layman's terms?<p>As far as I can tell, Apple has patented something that has been produced before, and the website is requesting evidence of that to undo the patent?
Patents in Europe are much, very much, less restrictive than in USA: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_European_Patent_Convention" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Euro...</a>