Ask HN: Any free way to file a patent? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any free way to file a patent?

8 pointsashishb4u18 comments

The patent process requires some patent fee. Does anybody know of an open alternative? If not patent, atleast something that can prove that the idea was originated by somebody on some particular date and time.

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Get your idea down on paper, seal it, and mail it to yourself. This will of course prevent no one from infringing on your idea, but if all you are looking to do is prove someone came up with something before a certain date, this should do the job. Also, IANAL, so I don't know exactly what legal uses this would have.

sounds like a neat hack..

This is certainly a cool hack, but pretty common. When I first met with my startup's IP lawyer, this was one of the first things he told us to do; it's cheap, easy, and holds up well.

Why would that hold any weight at all? How do you prove you didn't just mail yourself an empty, unsealed envelope, into which you inserted the contents later... possibly even today?

Then that must have been one crappy lawyer!

Are you serious? An actual, practicing attorney told you this?

Seriously, this.

Time for a new lawyer

This idea is called "Poor Man's Copyright" and is discussed by Snopes here:

http://www.snopes.com/legal/postmark.asp

tl;dr Don't do that.

The particular method is frowned upon (because it could be faked), but the reasoning behind it is sound: As long as you can prove that you had an idea on such-and-such a date, you can challenge any later patent on it, and file for a patent yourself at any time (or rather, until other folks start using your idea without you challenging them).

Think of some electronic equivalents of sending yourself certified mail: save your idea on Google Docs; email it to yourself and your friends; check it into a private Github repo and save it to Tarsnap (both cost $$ unless you're already using those services). You should flesh out your idea in great detail, as detailed as a patent. If you take all these steps, you should be able to successfully challenge any later patent on the idea.

But, if you want to be able to sue anyone who uses your idea, you're going to need a patent. That's what a patent is: a license to sue. So if there's a good chance that someone will use your idea in the next few years, filing for a patent now will save you a lot of headaches. Remember that it takes years for a patent to be approved.

To be more technical, a patent is the right to exclude people from using your idea (which includes making using selling etc. etc.) Thus, you have a right to sue if someone is using it, but that is not the purpose of the patent on its face.

The Writer's Guild of America offers a registration service for written works. See http://www.wgawregistry.org/webrss/. It's ostensibly for screenplays, but they don't actually check the content of what is being registered. There is a modest fee. And whether or not registering with them will ever produce any actual benefit is IMHO highly questionable. But YMMV and all that.

Being that written works can only be copywritten, not patented, this would have no real effect. In theory, this could give you a leg to stand on with respect to proving prior art, but it's highly doubtful.

Actually, any prior art is prior art, whether or not it is "registered". Patent law doesn't require registration or publication with a patent-related agency or paper. It merely requires prior art that is publicly accessible or known.

The point of registering with a publicly known entity like the WGA is that it may prove a date for the prior art.

The specific issue here is whether the WGA's registry is sufficiently accessible that it constitutes a "public" publication.

The answer depends on what exactly is registered, and whether the idea is ever made public (i.e., internet blog, scholastic paper, conference presentation, etc) or is privately known to the persons seeking the patent (i.e., pitching this very idea to the people who later try to patent something based on your prior art, etc).

The WGA registry provides proof that something was registered on a given date, but does not provide a public search engine for searching the contents of registered works. So, by itself, the WGA registration would not provide any benefit unless you're trying to show that the patent-seeker had private knowledge of your prior art on a given date.

> The specific issue here is whether the WGA's registry is sufficiently accessible that it constitutes a "public" publication.

Definitely not. The WGA registry is confidential.

If you just want to prove that you had "idea X" at any given point in time, the simplest thing I can think of is to document the idea and then have the document notarized. Since a notary is a legally accepted witness to a signature, this should hold up. It may even be enough to mount a challenge against a subsequent patent (insert obligatory IANAL).

But if you really want to have a hope of preventing someone else from patenting it, then you need to publish.

How about putting an ad in a widely read newspaper containing a hashvalue of the document describing your idea?

..really?

A provisional patent is cheap, and if you just want to defend yourself from someone else later patenting your idea, it works just fine. You just write up a nice human-readable description of what you're doing and submit it to the USPTO. I think it's like a hundred bucks or so. Filing a full patent costs about $500. If you're willing to work, meaning, read a couple of books, read a couple of patents front to back, it's not that hard to file your own (called "Pro Se" by patent folks). Once you learn the ins and outs of patents, it's really not that hard nor that expensive to patent something yourself. At the very least, if you do file your own, you get "patent pending" protection ("protection" meaning, you've legally allowed to warn potential infringers that you've filed the papers officially) for a good 3-5 years while the patent office reviews your application.

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