2 ms·

Shouldn’t any international patent office reject these suspect patents based of open source software and hardware? Also, why does for example, US customs not st

Shouldn’t any international patent office reject these suspect patents based of open source software and hardware? Also, why does for example, US customs not step in and enforce stopping the importation of infringing devices? They seem to be happy to do that to sparkfun before, seizing one of their shipments https://hackaday.com/2014/03/20/fluke-issues-statement-regarding-sparkfuns-impounded-multimeters/ https://hackaday.com/2014/03/20/fluke-issues-statement-regar...

Palomides 3y ago
at least the US patent office takes a pretty weak "let the courts figure it out" approach, and I think customs enforcement is pretty similar in that it has to be prompted to act (actually checking every shipment for every possible violation seems impossible anyway)
toast0 3y ago
Patent offices can check whatever resources they want in terms of finding prior art. But in practice, they mostly just check patent applications, because they have a big database of those.
- varispeed 3y ago
  But they don't do that. Basically as it seems most patents, however ridiculous, get accepted and idea is that the real test for patent is when someone "breaches" it and it goes to court.
CuriousCosmic 3y ago
Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's open patent. Sure there's prior art which can prevent someone from creating a patent but if you actually want to guarantee that somebody doesn't patent your work, the path to do that is to file a patent yourself and open that patent up with patentleft (the patent analog for copyleft) or some other open patent. Yes filing patents can be expensive but for these companies it shouldn't be an issue and if they truly are a tiny org without the capabilities to file as a standard org, they can file under the small entity or micro entity fee schedules which are far cheaper.

2 ms·

Shouldn’t any international patent office reject these suspect patents based of open source software and hardware? Also, why does for example, US customs not st

by buildbot 3y ago

Palomides 3y ago
at least the US patent office takes a pretty weak "let the courts figure it out" approach, and I think customs enforcement is pretty similar in that it has to be prompted to act (actually checking every shipment for every possible violation seems impossible anyway)
toast0 3y ago
Patent offices can check whatever resources they want in terms of finding prior art. But in practice, they mostly just check patent applications, because they have a big database of those.
- varispeed 3y ago
  But they don't do that. Basically as it seems most patents, however ridiculous, get accepted and idea is that the real test for patent is when someone "breaches" it and it goes to court.
CuriousCosmic 3y ago
Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's open patent. Sure there's prior art which can prevent someone from creating a patent but if you actually want to guarantee that somebody doesn't patent your work, the path to do that is to file a patent yourself and open that patent up with patentleft (the patent analog for copyleft) or some other open patent. Yes filing patents can be expensive but for these companies it shouldn't be an issue and if they truly are a tiny org without the capabilities to file as a standard org, they can file under the small entity or micro entity fee schedules which are far cheaper.