Hi Perry,
At 2019-01-10Thu20:43:06+00, Perry Ismangil sent:
On Thu, 10 Jan 2019, 20:21 J. R. Haigh <JRHaigh+ML.OSHUG@runbox.com wrote:
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.
Thanks for the clarification James, I apologise for getting the wrong end of the stick!
Thanks. I'm glad that we're on the same page now. A related patent worry is when someone else patents a critical extension of your free/open idea. A notable example is that, while Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey, and Ernst Boris Chain left penicillin unpatented for the good of the people, they struggled to produce enough penicillin to treat the first few patients in 1941 and, in 1945, the process for its mass manufacture on a commercial scale was patented by Andrew Jackson Moyer. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin#History ) I interpret this as a strong argument for both patent abolition and patentleft. However, while patent abolition is unlikely to happen soon, patentleft has the unfortunate side-effect of financially-supporting the patent system.
Over the years I've heard of various prior art registry/crowdsourcing effort, nothing seems to stick around though.
Anything current? Anything current that is nonprofit or otherwise constitutionally-bound to their mission? I was approached by a software patent pooling scheme a few years ago which I declined to participate in because it was run by a private company with no constitutional commitment to keep the patent pool for the good of the community. I don't have any patents, and in that case they were only offering me protection, but nonetheless when I asked them why they were not a nonprofit and their response was that they wanted to keep their options open, it didn't feel right. I think for such a community effort to stick around it has to be nonprofit, or at least be constitutionally-bound, because all too often companies capture the interests of a community and then exploit it for profit in a manner which damages the community. If that patent pool had been nonprofit then I'd have joined without hesitation, especially if their mission was to make the patent system irrelevant.
Best regards, James R. Haigh.