
AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents - alexlmiller
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/09/askpatents-com-a-stack-exchange-to-prevent-bad-patents/
======
njl
If you violate a patent unknowingly, you are liable for damages. If you
violate a patent you know exists, you are liable for _treble_ damages.

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.

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.

~~~
dfc
Respectfully, I have to say that your "rational strategy" is a terrible
suggestion. This strategy only makes sense if your desired goal is to reduce
treble damage risk. Moreover it completely ignores the risk of devoting a ton
of resources to developing a product that is already protected by a patent.

~~~
njl
They're all protected by patents. All of them. I can pretty much guarantee you
that any of IBM, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Intellectual Ventures, and many
others have sufficient patent coverage to be able to sue you for anything you
could possibly build that involves software in any way.

[edited to scope it to software]

~~~
dfc
You do realize that the world is bigger than just software development?

~~~
sirtaptap
Well, this is a site for developers. It's reasonable to assume one's talking
about "building" software or something tech related.

------
joshuahedlund
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.

~~~
sophacles
A large part of the problem isn't the bureaucrats bumbling up the system, it's
the "government is always corrupt under all circumstances" crowd passing
"accountability" laws requiring 17 redundant forms in triplicate being filled
out and sent around to a dozen different independent oversight offices thereby
using $100 of resources (in the form of man hours, paper and so on) to spend
every $.01. The ones who make these rules do so out a mixture of some absurd
fear that that $.01 might be spend incorrectly so we must at all costs prevent
such a travesty (damn the costs) and a cynical attempt to prove how awful it
must be by their own sabotage (a mentality of "I believe there can be no good
here, so I will prove it by injecting as much bad as I can in the system")

Huge numbers of government employees would love to, and regularly do, suggest
ways of improving efficiency and outcome, only to be told "it is illegal to be
efficient". I've seen it happen over an over.

------
creamyhorror
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.

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.

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.)

edit: I wonder if there's any mechanism for discussion of _approved_ 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?

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).

~~~
d2vid
Regarding the treble damages for having read a patent - since these are patent
applications, not granted patents, perhaps one could argue that one didn't
know it was actually granted?

~~~
macchina
That wouldn't matter.

If you read an application, then you know the invention exists

If the application is rejected – it implies the invention is not novel.
Whereas if it is granted, it implies the invention is novel.

Either way, you should not be seeking a patent on that particular invention —
because you _know_ that you're not the first to invent.

~~~
jacalata
It matters a lot in whether or not you should /implement/ your design, not
whether you should try and patent it.

------
ajb
This is a step forward, and I hope it is successful.

However as it stands what this actually means is that finding prior art is an
_externality_ 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.

~~~
spolsky
I love that idea!

Until that happens, we actually expect that companies in patent-happy
industries will monitor filings by their competitors and spend some of their
own money and resources blocking competitors from building bad patent
portfolios (there was enough of this on Peer To Patent, a very small-scale
experiment, to give me confidence that it will happen)

~~~
6ren
That makes sense. Consumer protection law (Trade Practices Act) in Australia
was designed for consumers to use - but it turned out it was always
competitors who used them.

------
veidr
Fuck yeah. Applying crowdsourcing to prior art discovery is probably the most
viable treatment for improving the USA's patentile dysfunction problem, due
to:

a.) low-cost

b.) high potential for busting garbage patents

c.) low potential for abuse/trolling/making-things-worse

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.

~~~
gpcz
I just hope a patent troll doesn't sue Stack Exchange for patent infringement
in order to bring this service offline...

~~~
iamgoat
On the contrary, I would love to see what happens if they try. It would get
the right kind of attention. This service is a great step in the right
direction.

------
debacle
I was incredibly skeptical of this initially, but this is a collaborative
effort between SE, the USPTO, and Google.

I have some hope that this is a good step towards fixing things. Hopefully
that statement sounds cautiously optimistic enough.

------
laserDinosaur
There's some interesting ones on there already:

[http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/197/prior-art-
for...](http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/197/prior-art-for-style-
and-layout-caching-of-web-content)

[http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/133/prior-art-
for...](http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/133/prior-art-for-using-a-
camera-in-self-driving-cars)

------
dllthomas
This needs two things:

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).

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)?

------
denimboy
We need this too:

    
    
      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?

------
bpodgursky
Really cool!

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.

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.

~~~
alexchamberlain
The questions are supposed to be tagged with the industry, so you can
subscribe to that tag.

------
fpp
This is really great - some additional suggestions:

\- When you're submitting a patent application you are required to have done a
prior art search and list found prior art.

\- law firms providing patent services often outsource prior art searches
(more and more also to India etc)

\- companies attacked with "Jules Verne patents" or overly broad patents often
pay large amounts to find most relevant prior art

Suggestions:

(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+

(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%

(3) Similar to bounties this could also be done via a sponsoring system

~~~
danielweber
_When you're submitting a patent application you are required to have done a
prior art search and list found prior art._

What effect do you think this would have on small inventors?

~~~
fpp
this is a current requirement for everybody submitting a patent application

~~~
danielweber
Ah, I read "suggestions" as "let's make this change." Mea culp.

------
nancyhua
I'm not an economist or a lawyer so wondering:

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?

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).

------
bduerst
Every week I am becoming more and more impressed with Stack Exchange.

Last week it was "Cross Validated" - their version of stack overflow but
entirely for stats.

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

~~~
laserDinosaur
[http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/191/can-we-not-
in...](http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/191/can-we-not-invalidate-
older-patents-i-e-world-inc-vs-blizzard-entertainment)

------
wizzard
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?

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...

~~~
cruise02
“Any person at any time may cite to the Office in writing prior art consisting
of patents or printed publications which that person believes to have a
bearing on the patentability of any claim of a particular patent…”

> In other words, as of September 16, the USPTO is required to accept
> submissions from the public of prior art.

This is for third parties to weigh in on the patentability of an idea, not for
the person filing the patent.

------
lambada
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.

~~~
chalst
Some patents will get a lot of questions, and an advantage of doing things
this way is that you can use tag descriptions to provide background
information on patents.

There's not a huge cost to having this tag, either.

------
noonespecial
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.

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.

------
AshleysBrain
This is awesome. Check out how it's already turned up prior art for
Microsoft's 'whack to silence a phone' patent application:
[http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/109/microsoft-
hav...](http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/109/microsoft-have-
submitted-a-patent-for-a-whack-to-silence-a-phone-ringer-how-sim)

------
batgaijin
Jeez, I hope that server isn't using Linux, that infringes on the double
linked list patent.

<http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7028023/fulltext.html>

<http://www.makelinux.net/ldd3/chp-11-sect-5>

------
Dn_Ab
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 =)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4339035>

------
vpeters25
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.

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.

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.

------
sarichdavid
Check out Joel's Intro [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/09/askpatents-com-
a-stack...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/09/askpatents-com-a-stack-
exchange-to-prevent-bad-patents/)

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

------
ry0ohki
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?

~~~
noahl
Yes, but what other plausible way do we have for getting rid of bad patents?
The problem is that those "defensive" patents are all bogus too. If the bad
patents are ever going to stop, there has to be a transition period where some
of the old ones are still valid (although they can be invalidated over time),
but new ones aren't being granted (or realistically, not being granted at the
same rate as they were in the past).

Given that it has to happen some time, let's start right now.

------
andreasvc
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.

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.

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

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

~~~
m_myers
Like <http://parenting.stackexchange.com>?

~~~
golden_apples
Ha! By far the worst of the stackexchange network sites I've seen. My wife and
I sometimes read it for laughs.... Funny that people who can come up with a
dozen ways to solve a trivial programming problem, when confronted with a
parenting issue, invariably offer some useless brute-force based advice like
”show the kid who's boss”, or ”keep them in line”...

~~~
sathyabhat
so spend a few minutes posting an answer which is not so bad?

~~~
Shog9
But... Wouldn't that just keep the other answers in line by showing them who's
boss?

------
anuraj
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.

------
wissler
It's a trap!

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

~~~
coldpie
Change doesn't often happen in huge leaps and bounds. If you wait for huge
leaps and bounds to occur before you endorse a change, you'll never get any
change at all.

This at least brings attention to the issue, and has the support of Google
(and, I bet, other tech companies large and small in the coming days) and the
USPTO. Before today, would you have expected so large a community as SE to
create a website specifically dedicated to reviewing patents, of all things?
The scale of this site and its supporters should show that this is a growing
issue, and it's only going to garner more attention through Ask Patents.

One big advantage a site like Ask Patents gives us is the ability to quote
numbers and statistics. Consider an argument like this being presented to
Congress. 75% of the 500,000 patent filings in 2013 were found by Ask Patents
to contain claims on prior art, and were rejected by the USPTO. Each of these
cost an examiner two work days to review the application, prior art
submissions, and process the rejection. That adds up to <insert math here>, or
a whole lot of money! Clearly we need to enforce fees on rejected patents to
cut down on government spending.

I wholeheartedly support this idea and would love to see it take off.

------
ck2
It's a shame the patent office cannot/will not crowdsource patent research
before approval.

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.

Maybe we can get congress to pass a law - ha, nevermind what am I even
thinking...

~~~
dfc

      > "Maybe we can get congress to pass a law, nevermind what am I even thinking."
    

Because Congress never passes laws? Or because Congress never passes laws
pertaining to constitutionally prescribed responsibility to promote the
Progress of Science and useful Arts?" Did you read the article?

 _"a tiny provision in the America Invents Act, the “Patent Reform Act” which,
on the face of it, appears to have done absolutely nothing to solve this
problem, but if you look closely, there’s a tiny provision in there, which
says:

“Any person at any time may cite to the Office in writing prior art consisting
of patents or printed publications which that person believes to have a
bearing on the patentability of any claim of a particular patent…”

In other words, as of September 16, the USPTO is required to accept
submissions from the public of prior art."_

