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Comment by Vivtek | Hacker News Reader

Oh, good Lord, when the patent was filed, RunwayFinder was already online. Talk about prior art! This kind of abuse just boils my blood, especially when it involves this kind of penny-ante bullshit, the whole rent-seeking mentality of identifying a niche market that could really benefit from more open information and then trying to dominate it for chump change.

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EDIT: A comment below notes that this is a divisional patent and might have a date in 2001: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2008772

On the other hand, there's lots of prior art for drawing flight information on maps. Here's a video game from the 1980's that I played: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC9i1drUg8c#t=2m15s

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It's easy to validate the claims that RunwayFinder forms prior art for the patent, assuming that RunwayFinder hasn't changed significantly since then:

First blog post:

http://blog.runwayfinder.com/2005/07/

Slow snapshot from archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/20051030165731/http://www.runwayf...

Patent filing date:

09/28/2005, via http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7640098.html

Ok, I read the claim, looked at the dates and have to say this...WTF?

When I was in college I worked on a system for a government affiliated agency doing research into flight simulators and other aviation related software. The exact project I worked on did this patents claim as base functionality before we did the hard work. This was 1996. That technology had been around for, oh, probably 4 years at this point.

I'm 100% sure that this software was not productized to be seen by the patent office (nor was a patent filed by this agency...), but this technology has existed in one form or another since the invention of networked computing and having computable aviation data.

I was somewhat taken aback to realize that for all the talk at EFF about their patent busting project (http://w2.eff.org/patent/wp.php), there doesn't seem to be any public database of bustable patents, suggested prior art, or documented harm done.

Chilling Effects has a patent section (http://www.chillingeffects.org/patent/) - but it also doesn't seem to have much of a database-type thing. And the same goes for PUBPAT (http://www.pubpat.org/).

Is there anything else out there I'm missing?

The US patent office has the Peer to Patent project for public comment on pending patent applications: http://www.peertopatent.org/

Looks like it's voluntary and applies to a limited number of patent applications, but it is a step in the right direction by the US patent office.

This line in the patent:

  This is a divisional of application Ser. No. 09/919,672, filed Jul. 31, 2001.

means that it was effectively filed on that date, so you would need prior art predating 2001. (Though it might be more complicated than that, it depends on a couple of things.)

Also, FlightPrep refer to a 2004 review of online flight planners from the Aviation Consumer magazine. So, I would guess they date their invention before that.

http://www.flightprep.com/rootpage.php?page=aviationconsumer

when the patent was filed, RunwayFinder was already online

Doesn't matter. Patents are awarded by first to invent not first to file.

In the US that is true, but in Europe it's first to file

Depends on where you are in the world. The European Patent Office explains:

Virtually every patent office in the world (including the EPO and the JPO) is based on a first-to-file system. ... The USPTO, however, is the only office to be based on a first-to-invent system, meaning that a patent is granted to the person who first conceived and practiced the invention, rather than to the person who first filed the invention with authorities.

http://www.epo.org/topics/patent-system/patents-around-the-w...

I know that they want to change that, too, but I really hope they don't. Otherwise, the people who didn't think a thing was even worth patenting (or who couldn't afford to patent it) will have their inventions stolen from them.

I will justify the use of "stolen" here by saying it's because they're no longer legally able to use their own idea. Restricting an idea via IP laws is one of the few ways an idea can actually be stolen.

i'm not sure that's true, necessarily. IANAL (yet), but unless I'm mistaken, a patent still has to be novel. So if they had publicly disclosed what they thought had no value... they could invalidate any later patent that tried to make it illegal for them to use their idea.

As for the obvious comeback - no, you shouldn't not make public something which you think has no value. Either patent it or stick it out there to inspire someone with a different vision to your own. Don't hoard without knowing how to execute, especially without believing it's worth executing. As far as I'm concerned if you're doing that you deserve no rights to your 'invention' even if someone then comes along and patents it.

>... a patent still has to be novel.

In theory. Not necessarily in practice.

Well, what I've seen has been different: in the JMRI case, they patented the guy's idea and then sued him to stop using it (while infringing upon their copyrights, if memory serves).

Frankly, I wish that independent reinvention were at least weighed against novelty, but I haven't seen that work out in practice very often. Instead, they race to connect the dots once someone makes a new kind of dot available, even though everyone skilled in the art could probably could snap things together like Lego (TM) brand building blocks.

Even in the US with its unusual rule of first-to-invent, you can't file a patent on an invention that somebody else has also invented and disclosed to the public ("prior art").

> Patents are awarded by first to invent not first to file.

The default value for date-of-invention is date-of-filing. An inventor who wants to establish an earlier date-of-invention has the burden of proof (and must provide corroborating evidence such as a dated- and witnessed lab notebook, because it's too easy for an inventor to "misremember").

(Yes, we're talking current U.S. law here; most other countries are indeed first-to-file.)

Additional reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_inve...

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