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Comment by peter_retief | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that many patents are to stop others from patenting your work. It is a worry.

Open publication (at least in western jurisdictions) serves as prior art. If you don't intend to patent, just write about what you're doing openly and often!

Unfortunately prior art doesn't stop someone else from patenting your work. It just offers an avenue for someone to invalidate that patent. Worse still, the process of doing so is often riskier for small businesses than if they just agree to pay a licence fee.

But your argument applies equally to publishing your work as a patent as it does to publishing by some other means such as a journal article. So your comment doesn't address the parent comment at all.

Only in America and even there that's only true in theory. In practice it is a lot easier to invalidate a patent with an earlier patent than it is to argue prior art with a publication (this is, of course, depending on how the patents are written).

Patents can also be used "defensively" in ways that prior art cannot. So it's not always just about prevention.

Personally I think whole system could use an overall. Not just in America either.

Patent clerks search prior patents far more thoroughly than they do the entire literature of mankind. Having a prior patent is stronger protection from having someone else patent than is simply publishing somewhere.

I remember reading articles in "disclosure journals" published by different companies. My guess is that it was stuff that they didn't really think was worth patenting, but wanted to be safe from others patenting.

Haven't seen one of those in a while, and duck-go-go-ing didn't show anything either. I guess nowadays they just patent everything.

You could be right about just patenting everything. There have been suspiciously similar Chinese patents from an open source biometric projects that I was following. Who is going to check prior art in this avalanche of patents?

Can any publication serve as prior art? Can I use a personal blog or do I need a certain type of publication? I know of people who have sent copies of their work in the mail to themselves to prove prior art.

Any publication is fine as long as you can provide evidence. In fact the only thing special about publication is that it is a convenient way to demonstrate evidence of the prior art. What could be tricky about e.g. a personal blog post is proving that it was published when you say it was and that time stamps are genuine.

For those who are interested and doesn't know already[0] this is one of the places where blockchains and similar, older technoologies are actually useful: to provide irrefutable proof of knowledge at a given time.

Note however that similar services has been done for years[1] before Bitcoins and blockchains became a thing but since they neither need multi-Gigawatt-Proof-of-Work [2] nor any kind of "Coin" that can be pumped (and dumped) it wasn't cool.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/ (and hi to todays lucky 1/10000! : )

[1]: See here for an article that describes it: https://www.vice.com/en_nz/article/j5nzx4/what-was-the-first...

[2]: but, it kind of works anyway since it would take quite some work to find the majority + the archived ones of a certain days New York Times papers and change the classifieds section.

I'm somewhat sure that prior art requires publication, and not just knowledge.

The internet archive has long been used as evidence for such publication-at-time claims, and they even have a paid service allowing you to trigger snapshots IIRC. There's a FAQ regarding the use of their data in court cases that is somewhat interesting to read.

I know the cryptocurrency community has this absurd notion that nothing without cryptographic proof could or should ever be regarded as evidence. That trusting institutions, people, or processes marks you as a gullible fool, and that the Federal Reserve is conspiracy by private banks to keep the gentile from the levers of power[0].

So this is the not entirely novel situation of crypto being proposed to solve a problem that doesn't exist, and failing due to the lack of (usually: active hostility to) subject matter expertise.

[0] last point unrelated to this specific situation and just included for completeness

> I know the cryptocurrency community has this absurd notion that nothing without cryptographic proof could or should ever be regarded as evidence. That trusting institutions, people, or processes marks you as a gullible fool, and that the Federal Reserve is conspiracy by private banks to keep the gentile from the levers of power[0]. So this is the not entirely novel situation of crypto being proposed to solve a problem that doesn't exist, and failing due to the lack of (usually: active hostility to) subject matter expertise.

It reads like you count me in with the cryptocurrency community.

If anyone else does: don't.

I'm pointing out one single place were blockchain can be useful and then immediately pointing out that it isn't strictly necessary.

Yes, you are free to pay a lawyer and sue to attempt to invalidate a patent using your blog as evidence of prior art. Of course whichever side can afford it, will bury the other side in motions and discovery requests until they win.

Not a lawyer, but as I understand it any publicly accessible publication would suffice. Actually I think any sort of open demonstration of the idea that others can learn from is good enough, but I have no idea how edge cases are handled or precisely how open it has to be.

The sibling comment mentions a good point about the falsifiability of time stamps. If you're particularly worried about being challenged, you might point the Internet Archive at your blog or keep your blog content in a repo that you push to GitHub. For the truly paranoid, consult an attorney.

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