Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Branko Collin" <collin AT xs4all.nl>]

On 4 Jan 2005, at 17:38, Greg London wrote:
> Branko Collin said:

> > patents need to be published to constitute prior art.
> 
> A patent application is kept as a private exchange
> between the inventor and the patent office.

I am sorry, that was sloppily worded. I meant to say "inventions need 
to be published to constitute prior art".

> The idea, as far as I can see it, for patent exclusion
> using this approach would be to document and publish
> ideas to prevent some patent-factory from patenting
> stuff like the "one-click" patent, etc.

I am not sure that would work as a defensive strategy though. The one-
click shopping trick is an example of an "invention" that was trivial 
to come up with by anyone in the field. If a patent office won't stop 
granting patents on trivialities, I doubt they will refrain from 
patenting an invention because something that sounded like it was 
published in some obscure magazine.

A couple of months ago I asked Arnout Engelfriet, Dutch patent 
attorney for Philips, in a discussion about software patents, if it 
is known where patent offices look for published inventions. This was 
his reply (http://groups-
beta.google.com/group/nl.juridisch/msg/658fcad1de8ab303): 

> Theoretically this is known. So you can adapt your 
> publication strategy to this. Or, you do what IBM has 
> done in the past: you start your own magazine and mail 
> it to the USPTO every week.
> 
> In practice though, the Americans will really only search 
> existing patents, because they know their way around in 
> them, and these things are also reasonably well classified.
> Try and find something in an IT magazine if all you know
> is the year of publication.
> 
> I know from personal experience that the European patent 
> council also looks on the internet. But even then they 
> will mostly find scientific publications. So I think they
> may just be using some kind of directory, such as citeseer.

-- 
branko collin
collin AT xs4all.nl