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What is the best way to protect yourself from patent infingement claims besides getting a software patent?
Most times when people are talking about software patents, they are always saying you should get them for defensive purposes. Unless the company is evil (jk). I particularly don't like that because it feels like you are giving up and going along with something you normally wouldn't do but feel forced.
I'm wondering what the best way to protect yourself from reprisal would be *besides* going along with the system. Could you, for example, get everything for a patent worked up (as in, the full application) and then put the application into the public domain?
Obviously, that doesn't work if you want to keep the tech proprietary. What about the old mail-hack, sending yourself a registered letter containing the document.
It seems like you would still be at risk for a lawsuit since the validity of the document isn't stamped with the USPTOs approval, but would the above methods help in any quantifiable way? Would they help to prove prior art and dismiss any claims?
I'm wondering what the best way to protect yourself from reprisal would be *besides* going along with the system. Could you, for example, get everything for a patent worked up (as in, the full application) and then put the application into the public domain?
Obviously, that doesn't work if you want to keep the tech proprietary. What about the old mail-hack, sending yourself a registered letter containing the document.
It seems like you would still be at risk for a lawsuit since the validity of the document isn't stamped with the USPTOs approval, but would the above methods help in any quantifiable way? Would they help to prove prior art and dismiss any claims?
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Inappropriate?In theory, other companies can only get patents if they can prove that the idea is truly novel. In practice, software ideas are vague and prior art searches easily miss what in hindsight might be clear precedents. The result is that plenty of software patents go through, giving their holders an unfair advantage, and once gotten it's a lot harder to fight them unless you have a similarly broad/vague patent to counter-license to them.
It sucks, but it's the system we have.
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Inappropriate?Actually, it's pretty easy to fight against software patents without having the patent things yourself. The rules of patent law say that if someone has invented something already (called "prior art"), then no one else can patent that thing. So often the battles over software patents are battles over proving who invented something first (or showing it was obvious to invent it given what people in the field knew at the time.)
So how does one go about this pragmatically? Well, in order for something to be "prior art" or in the public domain, it needs to be published somewhere publicly available. In terms of software code or web innovations, this could be in something like a public SourceForge project archive, in a public newsgroup thread, or on a webpage indexed by popular search engines like Google. The simple act of posting it puts it into the public domain vis-a-vis other people's efforts to patent it.
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