Table of Contents
motivations
Contents
follow this link, it probably will motivate you
Google search for 'pays million $ patent' - just read the abstracts of the first 20 google pages, you don't need to follow the links
http://webshop.ffii.org - scary examples of european patents
Reinvention
The problem is, that many companys just reinvent things, that were already freely available to the public.
- For example the major telecomunications company Telekom in germany reinvented SPAM-Filters last year (granted patent DE10243243B4) and Siemens just reinventet CVS, SVN, rsync and similar tools (granted patent DE10319887B4).
This is like claiming to be the first who used a wheel in 2006!
So what has to be done to avoid such unbelievable behavior? Please take a look at our Milestones .
State of the Art
The State of the Art decides, whether an invention is new or not.
State of the Art are all publicly available documents. Additional to books or magazines, there are all websites, programs, and sourcecode that are freely available in the Internet.
One major problem is to give evidence that some online ressource was already available at some given date.
Printing all freely available Web-Sites, programs and Source-Codes in some kind of magazine could be an option, but much better is to integrate legal timestamping services into all OSS repositories. So there would be evidence even for only electronically available data! If you have ideas on how this could work out, please feel free to contribute to our Milestones .
other
- Create standards for tagging or categorization that can be used by all OSS repositories for location and evaluation of OSS.
- By knowing the USPTO searches the tags, authors can help provide their software as prior art to stop weak patents from issueing.
