3 ms·
This has always existed. You disclose the idea. Things that are public cannot be patented. Put your great idea up on arxiv and it becomes prior work which the
by light_hue_1 2y ago
This has always existed. You disclose the idea. Things that are public cannot be patented.
Put your great idea up on arxiv and it becomes prior work which the patent office can find. Or publish it in some conference. Etc. It gets officially timestamped and you're all done. You don't need any of this useless verifiable chain of communication nonsense. The world figured out how to do this centuries ago in far simpler ways.
Whether the patent office finds your prior art or not, that's a whole other question. They may still grant a patent no matter how obviously it overlaps with prior art. But then you can use your prior art when they come to try and shake you down, if it comes down to that.
- bilsbie 2y agoCouldn’t you post it on hacker news or X? That would have a pretty strong timestamp.
- rvnx 2y agoIt’s easy to fake if you are part of YC. You think they would lose 1B+ potential revenue if the only thing they have to do is to change one database record that nobody except them is monitoring ?
- qup 2y agoThey're not the only ones monitoring their own database.
- DowagerDave 2y agoit's pretty hard to unpublish something on the internet though. How many system do you think are consuming HN content? how many consume those? You can't un-ring a bell, so a simple social post is almost always discoverable in the future.
- aspenmayer 2y agoHN timestamps get rewritten for second chance pool submissions and possibly others.