Hi Perry,
At 2019-01-10Thu07:11:09+00, Perry Ismangil sent:
I'm not a patent lawyer, yet it seems to me thinking about *patents* in an *open source* hardware group is a really alien concept to me.
I too am not a patent lawyer, but we are all citizens of a society which unfortunately practises patent law. A group which does not agree with the law is not above the law or immune to it, so to not even *think* about it is to bury one's head in the sand! Having said that, I should clarify that the patent worries that I fear are that some non-OSH supporter sees my ideas, patents them, and then makes them proprietary. I've no intention of patenting my own ideas unless it turn-out to be (with free/open licensing) the only way to ensure that the ideas are not made proprietary by someone else. I hope that this is not necessary, though, because (A) I do not know how to file patents, and apparently it's not easy, and (B) I'd be financially supporting and popularising a system that I despise. Perhaps there's some 3rd-party prior art registration service run by a nonprofit. That would give me the confidence to discuss my ideas openly having registered them as prior art. My ideas are not necessarily game-changing or even useful, but when you see ‘patent pending’ or other mentions of patents on such simple products as plastic food tubs and whatnot, it's a reminder that there are people out there who are aggressively trying to patent stuff that we wouldn't even consider patentable, let alone our more interesting ideas.
Best regards, James R. Haigh.