

Ask HN: Any free way to file a patent? - ashishb4u

The patent process requires some patent fee. Does anybody know of an open alternative? If not patent, atleast something that can prove that the idea was originated by somebody on some particular date and time.
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jonafato
Get your idea down on paper, seal it, and mail it to yourself. This will of
course prevent no one from infringing on your idea, but if all you are looking
to do is prove someone came up with something before a certain date, this
should do the job. Also, IANAL, so I don't know exactly what legal uses this
would have.

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TrevorBurnham
The particular method is frowned upon (because it could be faked), but the
reasoning behind it is sound: As long as you can prove that you had an idea on
such-and-such a date, you can challenge any later patent on it, and file for a
patent yourself at any time (or rather, until other folks start using your
idea without you challenging them).

Think of some electronic equivalents of sending yourself certified mail: save
your idea on Google Docs; email it to yourself and your friends; check it into
a private Github repo and save it to Tarsnap (both cost $$ unless you're
already using those services). You should flesh out your idea in great detail,
as detailed as a patent. If you take all these steps, you should be able to
successfully challenge any later patent on the idea.

But, if you want to be able to sue anyone who uses your idea, you're going to
need a patent. That's what a patent is: a license to sue. So if there's a good
chance that someone will use your idea in the next few years, filing for a
patent now will save you a lot of headaches. Remember that it takes years for
a patent to be approved.

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d4ft
To be more technical, a patent is the right to exclude people from using your
idea (which includes making using selling etc. etc.) Thus, you have a right to
sue if someone is using it, but that is not the purpose of the patent on its
face.

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lisper
The Writer's Guild of America offers a registration service for written works.
See <http://www.wgawregistry.org/webrss/>. It's ostensibly for screenplays,
but they don't actually check the content of what is being registered. There
is a modest fee. And whether or not registering with them will ever produce
any actual benefit is IMHO highly questionable. But YMMV and all that.

~~~
rprasad
Actually, any prior art is prior art, whether or not it is "registered".
Patent law doesn't require registration or publication with a patent-related
agency or paper. It merely requires prior art that is publicly accessible or
known.

The point of registering with a publicly known entity like the WGA is that it
may prove a date for the prior art.

The specific issue here is whether the WGA's registry is sufficiently
accessible that it constitutes a "public" publication.

The answer depends on what exactly is registered, and whether the idea is ever
made public (i.e., internet blog, scholastic paper, conference presentation,
etc) or is privately known to the persons seeking the patent (i.e., pitching
this very idea to the people who later try to patent something based on your
prior art, etc).

The WGA registry provides proof that something was registered on a given date,
but does not provide a public search engine for searching the contents of
registered works. So, by itself, the WGA registration would not provide any
benefit unless you're trying to show that the patent-seeker had private
knowledge of your prior art on a given date.

~~~
lisper
> The specific issue here is whether the WGA's registry is sufficiently
> accessible that it constitutes a "public" publication.

Definitely not. The WGA registry is confidential.

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HeyLaughingBoy
If you just want to prove that you had "idea X" at any given point in time,
the simplest thing I can think of is to document the idea and then have the
document notarized. Since a notary is a legally accepted witness to a
signature, this should hold up. It may even be enough to mount a challenge
against a subsequent patent (insert obligatory IANAL).

But if you really want to have a hope of preventing someone else from
patenting it, then you need to publish.

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zmn
How about putting an ad in a widely read newspaper containing a hashvalue of
the document describing your idea?

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dzlobin
..really?

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kapauldo
A provisional patent is cheap, and if you just want to defend yourself from
someone else later patenting your idea, it works just fine. You just write up
a nice human-readable description of what you're doing and submit it to the
USPTO. I think it's like a hundred bucks or so. Filing a full patent costs
about $500. If you're willing to work, meaning, read a couple of books, read a
couple of patents front to back, it's not _that_ hard to file your own (called
"Pro Se" by patent folks). Once you learn the ins and outs of patents, it's
really not that hard nor that expensive to patent something yourself. At the
very least, if you do file your own, you get "patent pending" protection
("protection" meaning, you've legally allowed to warn potential infringers
that you've filed the papers officially) for a good 3-5 years while the patent
office reviews your application.

