11/06/13
Here's an idea you can use to kill Patent Trolls in your industry: Just imagine the world in 3-5 years and publish every idea you can think of on your blog. That way, it will be considered prior art before anyone can file a patent.
From the
USPTO website:
A reference is proven to be a “printed publication” “upon a satisfactory showing that such document has been disseminated or otherwise made available to the extent that persons interested and ordinarily skilled in the subject matter or art, exercising reasonable diligence, can locate it.”…
An electronic publication, including an on-line database or Internet publication, is considered to be a “printed publication”…
— via Wikipedia
Imagine if someone had blogged about online shopping before Amazon filed their infamous
1-click patent. Assuming there were blogs in 1999, that is.
For Example, let's imagine we're all going to be wearing Google Glasses and be driven around in self-driving cars one day soon right? What inventions might Google want to patent for them?
Here’s an idea: As you're riding in your self-driven car, probably watching a movie on your Google Glasses (what else to do?), you might want to be alerted if you are coming up to a favorite restaurant, and it's near lunchtime. Your display will automatically show you this, possibly overlaid on the upcoming scenery, and offer to book you a table. You indicate yes with a gesture or possibly through a mind-machine interface. The system automatically sends a request wirelessly to the restaurant and confirms the response.
Your car then pulls in a few minutes later. You get out, enter the restaurant, and are immediately escorted to your table.
Cool huh? Why can't we live in the future now?
If you want to score extra points, just go over that scenario and call out all the possible variants:
Instead of restaurant, it can be any commercial or non-commercial entity. The offer can be pre-stored, or obtained in real time. Yeah, let's go broad.
The display can be any physical device that communicates with you, by any means. Car can be any vehicle. The request can be communicated via any channel… etc.
Imagine if we all did this for 5 minutes a week. All the crappy “I can't believe that's patentable" ideas would be exhausted before long. And you will likely get a couple of good blog posts out of it too.
Related: Business, Society.