Open Source Hardware and the Law

I know his focus was on cheaters unfairly profiting off the work of the community and how copyright can stop this but patents can't. But there's something else that current patent law does automatically do for OS hardware that I think will turn out to be very important. Once the community creates and publishes a hardware function, it automatically becomes prior art and can never be locked away from the community by the (let's face it truckloads) of bad actors in the commecial patent space.

With the rate the open hardware community is growing, I don't doubt that it will soon the the dominant force for small scale innovation in the gadget space. I see this as a key part if the final solution to the "patent mess" we find ourselves in today.

How much prior art is there on hackaday right now?

I'm surprised the article does not mention firmware. It is an essential part of many electronic devices, is copyrightable, and it is not often feasible to replace it with an open-source equivalent.