Seeing the survey posted by Kerba as well as thinking about Arduino and Open source and innovatoin in general got me wondering:
If I invent a product or device or something and I open source the design and GPL/LGPL or whatever it, does that prevent anyone from going and filing a patent on it?
Since it costs so much to file a patent can open sourcing your design not only protect it at minimal cost, but it also puts it out there in the hands of many other experts which could ultimately save you on R&D etc.
Sure anyone can now make it, but that makes your product more well known and you can make money out of consulting etc etc. Just like the Arduino team has done!
Another thing is if someone makes a kit of something that is patented and makes all the plans ie schematics, source code, PCB layouts etc available openly, can they be infringing a patent. Even though its not really a commercial product, just a hobby project. That is of course assuming you didn't reverse engineer the product but made your own hobby one from scratch.
does that prevent anyone from going and filing a patent on it?
It might but only if the filling lawyer finds it. However, it could invalidate (make not enforceable) a patent. It is called "prior art" and consists of a public demonstration of publication of the work.
However I think you misunderstand what a patent is. It is not an object it is a principal or technique that is novel, new or applied in that field for the first time. So you question about kits is not actually a relevant question.
All a patent does is to allow the patent holder to sue someone who breaches it. They can only sue for loss of earnings due to you "steeling the idea". (this can vary in different countries and is the U.K. situation) So if you sell a lot you are worth suing, if you sell only a few then it is not worth it.
There is no inherent protection in a patent, in fact some companies employ people to search patents looking for ideas to steal and assessing if the people who hold them are big enough to sue them for infringement. Would you like to take on Microsoft or Apple? You need money and resources even with no win no fee.
To be honest I don't really understand the whole patent thing. What bothers me is that I come up with an idea for something, and I don't have the energy or time to patent it and someone goes and patents my idea and stops me right there and then.
Not that I have any ideas in mind at the moment, but I have seen a few projects that could have been built for fun or even profit get patented.
I have also had some people ask me to help them develop ideas they have, and they want to patent it. Eventually the projects stalled because of lack of funding.
It seems to be a costly exercise to patent something and not worth investing in if its not going to become very profitable, and it also seems like people think that patenting is a get rich quick thing.
My whole question is if the "technique" and a working prototype can be protected from patenting, by open sourcing the idea then it can save me from having someone else with the resources go and patent it.
Here is a good article by Don Lancaster on a case against patents. Don has been in the electronics DIY and small business sense before the invention of the microprocessor. His advice is from a very practical basis and I recommend his site for lots of great info. I self taught on logic ICs with his RTL cookbook in the early 70s and met him once at a microcomputer show in Los Angles in the late 70s.
If I invent a product or device or something and I open source the design and GPL/LGPL or whatever it, does that prevent anyone from going and filing a patent on it?
Yes. Publishing an "invention" will prevent anyone from patenting it (including yourself, unless you file the patent within a year of the publication.)
In theory, of course. It's possible that you published after the patent was filed by someone else. It's possible that the person patenting the same invention never sees your publication. It's possible that someone sees your publication and decides you'll never notice their patent. It's possible that someone sees your patent and decides that their lawyers can ride all over you anyway. It's possible that your publication already infringes on someone else's patent in the first place.
Patents are pretty weird these days; mostly a tool of large corporations and mostly against each other, and mostly used via cross-licensing agreements ("stop bugging us about your frivolous patent X or we'll bug you about our frivolous patent Y!")
I do NOT have a warm place in my heart for people who patent their "ideas" but "don't have the the time or inclination to develop an actual product, but would rather sit around and wait for someone to pay them money. ("patent trolls.") There's a lot distance between a raw idea and a real product...
"Patent trolls" thats probably the best description. There are too many ideas that have relegated to the patent archives because of this kind of behaviour.
Just the other day I had an idea for a little project using the Arduino, after some googleing I saw it was already patented :
after some googleing I saw it was already patented
Yes but that doesn't stop you from making one, it might stop you from making a million but you don't know until you read the patent with the eyes of a lawyer. Just because a patent has been granted it doesn't mean that it is a defensible patent.
How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
Non Bill declares dark as the new standard.
I guess one major question is still not resolved here. Imagine that someone creates an open source project, all details public, and it becomes extremely popular. For argument's sake let's say that it's the Arduino. Now, what if there was a patentable aspect of the Arduino, and someone actually patented it years ago. They notice that the Arduino infringes their patent.
Now what? Who do they sue? The person who created the Arduino design and open-sourced it? Or perhaps everyone who has ever built and sold an Arduino? Can they prevent further distribution of the Arduino design? I feel they might actually be able to do all of the above.
So open-source designs may actually be a goldmine for patent trolls. Open source can spread extremely fast, and provide a lot of potential targets for lawsuits. The downside is that most targets wouldn't be big enough to make a full lawsuit worthwhile...but then, most targets would be small enough that the threat of a lawsuit may allow the patent troll to harvest a few thousand dollars to settle out of court (sounds like RIAA huh?) and that would cost a few cents for an official sounding letter. If you targeted everyone who has produced and sold an Arduino or clone, you could grab $100,000 without much work. Assuming, of course, that you did have an enforceable patent.
But then...the enforceability of the patent may not matter very much! For small companies building open-sourced projects in small quantities, by the time they've gotten to court to contest the infringement, they've already lost too much money. So again, the bare threat of a lawsuit may be enough for a patent troll to collect lots of $1000-$5000 settlements.
This sucks to think about. I guess everyone who builds and sells an open-source design (or any design without researching patents first) needs to be aware that there is an element of risk.
To be honest I don't really understand the whole patent thing. What bothers me is that I come up with an idea for something, and I don't have the energy or time to patent it and someone goes and patents my idea and stops me right there and then.
If you don't want anyone to patent your idea just get it published in a self-authenticating
publication. This will start the time clock ticking. After a period of time it will be unpatentable by anyone.
I'm sure the whole patent thing will continue to be a confusing mess in the future as well, if not more so.
As different patent laws are created or changed by individual countries and now that we have such masses of information and ideas spreading globally via the web, I can't ever see a time where the lawyers have to fear any decrease in patent law cases.
I can't ever see a time where the lawyers have to fear any decrease in patent law cases.
Death, taxes and lawyers?
ideas spreading globaly via the web
Citing a website as prior art may not work in court. A number of cases that I have
read for trademark disputes required web data be corroborated. Of course if you
need to corroborate it with a second source there is no sense in submitting it.
There have in fact been many examples of open-source software infringing on assorted patents, probably starting with the unix/cpm "compress" utility back in the late 1970s (clearly infringes on the LZW compression algorithm, which is patented.) In most cases that I'm aware of, patent holders have behaved pretty reasonably, but there have been occasional scrambles to adapt some new standard for open source to perceived real or imagined problems with "owned" intellectual property (cf GIF vs PNG image formats? Or the mess in DVD players?) Owned Intellectual Property is incompatible with the politics of the more vociferous open source pundits, regardless of reasonableness of owners/licensing, etc.
In the absence of actual theft of a patented idea, I think one could make a good argument that an idea that someone independently invents and publishes as open source fails the "not obvious" clause of what is supposed to be patentable. I think many corporate entities are a bit embarrassed to attack "good guys" over their obvious patents; I'm not sure about trolls (and other corporations are fair game, of course.)
You might check with the "opencores" folks (who implement open-source FPGA designs, frequently capable of emulating popular existing chips.)
Well, I only skimmed alot of this thread.. so I'm sure I missed something!
But one thing to keep in mind.. it's the Arduino that's covered by the Creative Commons license, Not the chip itself. Arduino includes the Arduino IDE, Arduino site, the Arduino board(not including the chip), and a few other things, I'm sure.
So nobody is stopping you from creating a "patent", but keep in mind.. you're also up against Atmel (creator of the chips), you'd have to include them in the patent, or at least have an agreement of sorts.
Now, if you use an Arduino board, the program, etc etc, and you go out, put that in a.. say.. just a temperature sensor that logs the data with an LCD, and it has the board inside, you MAY be able to create a patent(highly doubtful) but you would need to include the Arduino, you would need permission, and of course you'd have to list on the packaging that it includes an Arduino.
(sorry if it's kind of spread around.. and I had a buddy who got sue'd for creating the Fire Alarms that connect wirelessly, if one goes off.. they all go off. He got sue'd for .. I don't recall, some patent issues though. Now he's paying $20,000 a month for a total of 2 years I believe.)
Nonsense. A patent need not be specific about the details of the hardware. It doesn't need to say "arduino", it doesn't need to say "atmel", it may no even need to say "microcontroller."
(there's a separate thing (at least in the US) called a "design patent" that covers (sort of) unique implementations rather than new ideas.)
For example, I have a patent that claims (more or less) that you can implement a web server in a very tiny microcontroller by pre-building and storing the packet stream you expect to transmit, and doing very basic pattern matching on the incoming packets. It doesn't mention any particular micro vendor...
