AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents

If you violate a patent unknowingly, you are liable for damages. If you violate a patent you know exists, you are liable for <i>treble</i> damages.<p>The only rational thing for someone who actually makes stuff to do is to not read any patents, ever, as a matter of general policy.<p>This might not be the socially responsible answer; we should all be fighting the patent madness in our industry. It is, however, the most logical course of action. It puts the lie to the whole "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" thing, but that's where we are.

My favorite part is how the Patent Office director approached Stack Exchange about doing this. As someone who leans libertarian, it's easy to learn about the bad ways government restricts innovation, such as the current patent system, and assume that all government agents involved are either bumbling bureaucrats inadvertently screwing up the system or corrupted cronies deliberately screwing up the system. Of course, those kinds of people exist, but it's encouraging to see that the director is taking intelligent and thoughtful steps to improve his office's work, as well as a pleasant reminder that my default stereotypes about government employees are often wrong. Not a panacea for the patent debacle, of course, but an awesome step in the right direction.

This seems wonderful. It's exactly the sort of practical solution that could really make a big dent in the patent problem, and to see it actually come into being with the cooperation of the USPTO and Google Patent Search is very, very heartening.<p>I hope folks here will take time to read this new site from time to time and raise any particularly problematic patent applications to their circles. There's the risk of reading a patent and then potentially being made liable for trebled damages, but hopefully any ridiculous patents will get filtered out by this system, reducing the risk of violation in the first place.<p>I see a two-tier system emerging: a group of "frontline" patent reviewers reading AskPatents regularly, and a wider group of people interested in patents within an industry. If only the really problematic patents are brought to the attention of the wider group, they won't have to worry so much about liability for trebled damages. The "frontline" people reading new submissions on AskPatents and trumpeting out the basket cases - they'll be the ones taking on the trebled-damages risk. I hope there'll be some among us who can play this role. (It'll probably end up being interested hobbyists or the patent-hunting departments of large corporations.)<p>edit: I wonder if there's any mechanism for discussion of <i>approved</i> patents? This might provide the seed material for patent reexamination, which in turn allows for patent invalidation. If people review approved patents and start offering prior art for some, any patent trolls intending to wield those patents might start having second thoughts, because it'll look like those patents are on shaky legal ground. This way, even after being granted, questionable patents could still be cast into doubt. Maybe I'm overoptimistic, but how far could Spolsky/the PTO push this?<p>edit2: Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like there's no "patent application stream" on AskPatents, so it's basically a bog-standard discussion board for patents right now. It might be more handy if it had an integrated feed from the patent application database (no need for an API, even an RSS feed would work).

This is a step forward, and I hope it is successful.<p>However as it stands what this actually means is that finding prior art is an <i>externality</i> of submitting a patent claim. The cost of stopping a dubious patent from causing damage is borne by the victims, rather than the instigator. If these crowdsourcing schemes are successful, the next step should be to make filers of such patents pay a fee to those who found the prior art.

Fuck yeah. Applying crowdsourcing to prior art discovery is probably the most viable treatment for improving the USA's patentile dysfunction problem, due to:<p>a.) low-cost<p>b.) high potential for busting garbage patents<p>c.) low potential for abuse/trolling/making-things-worse<p>With respect to (c), the most obvious attack vector for Myhrvoldian corporo-fascists would be DOS/dilution-via-huge-numbers-of-paid-shills. But I think that's why Stack Overflow's backing is exciting; they are Internet-scale.

I was incredibly skeptical of this initially, but this is a collaborative effort between SE, the USPTO, and Google.<p>I have some hope that this is a good step towards fixing things. Hopefully that statement sounds cautiously optimistic enough.

There's some interesting ones on there already:<p><a href="http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/197/prior-art-for-style-and-layout-caching-of-web-content" rel="nofollow">http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/197/prior-art-for...</a><p><a href="http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/133/prior-art-for-using-a-camera-in-self-driving-cars" rel="nofollow">http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/133/prior-art-for...</a>

This needs two things:<p>1) An additional "this patent is so bad the applicant deserves to be slapped," and a meaningful penalty for submitting atrocious patents (scaled to be meaningful based on who is submitting it).<p>2) Some compensation for those who are doing a good job providing prior art. This doesn't have to be financial - improving professional reputation would probably be enough, but that's not really going to happen if it's relatively few people on the site. Could we come up with a way of increasing the exposure of contributers (when they want it)?

We need this too:<p><pre><code> http://pyvideo.org/video/425/pycon-2011--how-to-kill-a-patent-with-python Part I (5 mins): The USPTO as a data source.* The full-text of each patent is available from the USPTO (and now from Google.) What does this data look like? How can it be harvested and normalized to create data structures that we can work with? Part II (15 mins, in two parts):* Once the patents have been cleaned and normalized, they can be turned into data structures that we can use to evaluate their relationship to other documents. This is done in two ways - by modeling each patent as a document vector and a graph node. Part IIA (7 mins): Patents as document vectors.* Once we have a patent as a data structure, we can treat the patent as a vector in an n-dimensional space. In moving from a document into a vector space, we will touch on normalization, stemming, TF/IDF, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Part IIB (7 mins): Patents as technology graphs.* This will show building graph structures using the connections between patents - both the built-in connections in the patents themselves as well as the connections discovered while working with the patents as vectors. We apply some social network analysis to partition the patent graph and find other documents in the same technology space. Part III (5 mins): What have we built?* Now that we have done all this analysis, we can see some interesting things about the patent database as a whole. How does the patent database act as a map to the world of technology? And how has this helped with the original problem - finding better prior art?</code></pre>

Really cool!<p>One idea-- it would be awesome if I could set up an account with a list of topics I have experience in (maybe just pulled from linkedin?), and be automatically notified when an application relevant to my knowledge is submitted.<p>I bet there would be thousands of people happy to chime in once a week / month when a patent in a specific field they have experience in was submitted. It would be a great way to build up a base of expert knowledge without requiring people to be constantly polling the site.

This is really great - some additional suggestions:<p>- When you're submitting a patent application you are required to have done a prior art search and list found prior art.<p>- law firms providing patent services often outsource prior art searches (more and more also to India etc)<p>- companies attacked with "Jules Verne patents" or overly broad patents often pay large amounts to find most relevant prior art<p>Suggestions:<p>(1) alloy users to put up bounties for finding prior art on existing / pending patents or for technology areas. I believe bounties should be starting with about $5K up to $100k+<p>(2) pay out those bounties based on a particular formula - e.g. when usable results top 5/ best answers get shares of the bounty pool - e.g. best answer 35%, 2nd 20%, 3rd 15%, 4th 10%, 5th 10%, 6th 10%<p>(3) Similar to bounties this could also be done via a sponsoring system

I'm not an economist or a lawyer so wondering:<p>1) Should there be a penalty for people who file patents that obviously have a ton of prior art to incentivize people not to do this or to do more research?<p>2) Should there be a reward for people who discover prior art invalidating patent applications/ claims? The reward could come from a) people who are using the idea without holding the patent and thus don't want to get sued over the patent and are benefiting from the research, and b) the frivolous filers from 1).

Every week I am becoming more and more impressed with Stack Exchange.<p>Last week it was "Cross Validated" - their version of stack overflow but entirely for stats.

What about existing patents, can they be challenged with prior art too?

Maybe I'm missing something, but if I come up with a great idea and have any inkling that it may be patentable, why would I want to post the idea publicly before trying to patent it? Wouldn't that open it up to the possibility of theft?<p>Sure, the existence of the post could prove you thought of it first, but that doesn't prove that the idea was stolen from there nor does it pay for a lawyer...

Part of me is cringing that each Patent gets its own tag, given that it's likely there won't often be more than a few topics per patent.

This is even more useful than it sounds at first. If all it did was to prevent patents with essentially identical claims from being issued over and over, it would be a huge win.<p>As it is now, simply paying off one troll because you validate a password or a license in you app is no guarantee whatsoever that another won't show up next week to troll you on the exact same feature.

This is awesome. Check out how it's already turned up prior art for Microsoft's 'whack to silence a phone' patent application: <a href="http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/109/microsoft-have-submitted-a-patent-for-a-whack-to-silence-a-phone-ringer-how-sim" rel="nofollow">http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/109/microsoft-hav...</a>

Jeez, I hope that server isn't using Linux, that infringes on the double linked list patent.<p><a href="http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7028023/fulltext.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7028023/fulltext.html</a><p><a href="http://www.makelinux.net/ldd3/chp-11-sect-5" rel="nofollow">http://www.makelinux.net/ldd3/chp-11-sect-5</a>

Oh good! Something like this is what I asked for/about a 1.5 months ago. Although, I missed the crowdsourcing angle. Also glad to see that the Patent Office does want to be more productive =)<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4339035" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4339035</a>

This is progress, but not nearly enough. Imho we shouldn't need to dig prior art like this to protect ourselves. I think granting a patent should be the EXCEPTION, not the norm and patent examinators should aim at finding any excuse not to grant the patent instead of rubber stamp it unless they find prior art.<p>Right after the patent examinator decides the claim is novel it should test whether it is overly broad. For this, simply testing if the claim covers more than one implementation should save a lot of grief. If the software algorithm is described in pseudocode: rejected, in C: approved. This would allow for clean-room reverse-engineering (the claim uses C, we used java), something held as legal for ages in the non software patent world.<p>And before somebody argues this would make pretty much all software patents worthless: you are correct. Software should not be protected by patents since it is already protected by copyright law.

Check out Joel's Intro <a href="http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/09/askpatents-com-a-stack-exchange-to-prevent-bad-patents/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/09/askpatents-com-a-stack...</a>

I thought it said AskParents.com .. which could be a good idea in itself.

This is awesome, my only fear is that it only stops new Patents, giving existing dubious patents even more power, since it will be harder to create a new "defensive" Patent?

So they're basically hoping to get free labor using crowd sourcing. I don't see this taking off because I don't see the incentive for volunteers to put a lot of work into shooting down someone's patent. While the result will be less patents, a much preferable situation would be no patents at all.<p>I really wonder how it's supposed to work with the amount of patents granted nowadays. Say you come up with a new product, can you really be expected to go and read all pending patents in existence to verify you're not infringing? It's practically impossible, so I suppose it's mostly fingers crossed that you won't get sued.

Is it true that you can't get a software patent in the UK yet US software patents are applicable here?

Read that as Parents... might be a good idea?

First thing to be done is to reform the legal practice. Why is legal assistance so costly? Why can't it be done cheap. The legal mafia needs to be busted first.

It's a trap!<p>I'm serious. This is a horrible idea. It's simply a way to get you to forge your own new set of chains.

It's a shame the patent office cannot/will not crowdsource patent research before approval.<p>I bet if an examiner posted each patent application during review, within 24 hours prior art would be posted for each one, most especially software patents.<p>Maybe we can get congress to pass a law - ha, nevermind what am I even thinking...