Re: [Visionaries] Exploring the noosphere

[David Sugar]

I will offer a counter-point to this idea.  Doing this can be used to create 
"prior art" that may successfully overturn a future patent, but such an 
outcome is neither certain, nor prevents others from successfully securing 
"invalid" patents anyway against ignorent examiners, and then potentially 
causing emmense problems until/unless somebody then comes along with enough 
funds comes along to make use of the prior art thus posted.  There is also 
some risk that establishing such a list or site may itself become a source 
for patent "mining" by unscroupoulus entities who will realize the cost of 
securing the patent is less than the cost required by others to overturn it.

David

On Sunday 11 May 2003 10:02 pm, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> Peter Minten <address@hidden> wrote:
> > patents are the greatest threat to Free Software programmers.
>
> Agreed.
>
> > So to prevent from getting hit by patents we simply have to
> > race the Evil Alliance (MS and co) to the new areas.
>
> Yes.
>
> > If we arrive there first we have to document what we see
>
> From what I've been told, the best way to do this may be to
> pseudo-implement the ideas in some kind of pseudocode that
> every skilled developer will understand, but which is still
> 100 times faster to write than a real program (which is
> supposed to compile cleanly and actually work :-) and then
> post that pseudocode to a mailing list such as this.  This
> act of _publishing_ creates Prior Art which can be used to
> defeat patents on those ideas.
>
> > in a way that can not be misunderstood by lawyers
>
> I wouldn`t bother with trying to explain technical stuff in
> ways that lawyers (who don't have real programming skills
> like e.g. Eben Moglen has) will understand.  From a legal
> perspective, it suffices if "someone skilled in the art",
> i.e. skilled, professional software developers with real
> experience in the subject matter, can understand what you
> write.
>
> Greetings, Norbert.