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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

> "In 2017 Eric Lengyel published an algorithm, called Slug, that stopped dodging. It renders glyphs directly from their outlines in the fragment shader, with no texture atlas and no per-frame tessellation. Lengyel patented it in 2019, and on March 17, 2026 he dedicated that patent to the public domain."

It's nice that he gave the patent to public domain, but this is not how patents are supposed to work. You can't patent something two years after it was already published.

I'm guessing he actually filed for a patent before publishing, and the article should read: "Lengyel was granted a patent for it in 2019"

It's an AI-written article, so maybe it's not reasonable to expect it to be consistent on this level...

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* The provisional patent application for the Slug algorithm was filed on March 27, 2017, and this is incorporated into the final patent at the beginning of the Description section. A provisional patent establishes a priority date for everything it discloses (which was the whole algorithm), and it gives the inventor one year to complete the application process.

* The JCGT paper was published a few months later on June 14, 2017, after the priority date.

* The final patent application was submitted on February 1, 2018, before the one-year deadline.

* The patent was granted about 1.5 years later by the USPTO on August 6, 2019.

The details are in Eric's post here:

https://terathon.com/blog/decade-slug.html

The timeline basically checks out, maybe it simply took the patent office over a year to process the patent application?

No, application filed 2018-02-01, after the publication. Though yes it took more than a year to grant it

correction: the provisional patent application was filed before the publication, not after

He filed in 2018-02-01, after publishing in 2017. What do you think breaks in the patent system with such an approach? https://terathon.com/blog/decade-slug.html

You need to file before publishing to establish the priority date.

A sibling comment notes that he indeed filed a provisional patent in 2017 before going public. That’s the part that the article muddled. 2019 was when the patent was granted, not filed.

You can file after (within a year)

> provisional application can be filed up to 12 months following an inventor's public disclosure of the invention.

https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics/apply/provisional-appli...

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