[Discuss] The America Invents Act

[Hsuan-Yeh Chang]

The best "priorart.org" for all industry is "patft.uspto.gov".  My view is that the open source community should file more patent applications.  International treatise requires that all patent applications be published after being filed for 18 months.  Such pre-grant publications will be searched by the Patent Examiners and will become the most powerful "prior art" against all late comers.  Also, pre-grant publications can be used as a very good source of open source documentation.  (Patent documents published by the Patent Office do not have copyrights.)


As RMS pointed out in the video, patents can be used for cross-licensing.  If there is a non-profit organization who would hold patents for the open source community, this would be one way to obtain cross-licensing from those mega companies.  Such non-profit would guard the little guys against the risk of patent suits.  What the open source needs is to collect more bargaining chips.  Simply denying the fact that software patents are still valid in the United States would not do us any good.


HYC



________________________________
From: Mark Woodward <markw at mohawksoft.com>
To: Hsuan-Yeh Chang <hsuanyeh at yahoo.com>
Cc: "discuss at blu.org" <discuss at blu.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2011 6:06 AM
Subject: Re: [Discuss] The America Invents Act


> What we need is a evidenciary quality priorart.org repository where open source software is stored, made public, and has a legally verifiable submission date.