A Parallel System for Defensive Publication

Many inventors wish to make a public disclosure of their ideas for public benefit. Sometimes the disclosure comes in the form of an academic publication. Sometimes it appears as a “defensive publication”. Companies pay to have selected ideas published in specialized journals to prevent other companies getting patents on them. This way, the company can avoid the cost and effort of obtaining a patent, and still make sure that they can always use the disclosed ideas in their own products. Research Disclosures is a publication that accepts papers written for defensive publication.

What about a simpler, parallel process that a larger number of inventors can contribute to? There are not too many publications that individual inventors can publish in without paying a price-per-page charge. Many such publications focus only on specific areas of work.

I have a specific set of suggestions to create a parallel system:

1)  Inventors should familiarise themselves with what a patent examiner expects of a patent. Some information on this is available in an article on the MIT Website. The disclosure text should describe the invention clearly, indicating some manner of creating an embodiment of the invention, so that a professional in the field can be convinced that the invention could conceivably be implemented.

2)  Then they should create a write-up for publication on the Web, on a well-known site which is regularly covered by search engines. I will use my blog on blogspot.com for this purpose, among others. 

3)  Their disclosures should focus on an invention or a set of closely connected inventions. The write-up should not be too long.

4)  They should attach a standard declaration reading roughly as follows to their write-up:

QUOTE

PublicInventionDisclosure: Any novel ideas discussed here are being consciously published for public benefit.  Patent applications made after this publication cannot claim credit for those ideas.

UNQUOTE

The proposal is that publication of ideas in this form would make it easy for anyone to locate them – other inventors, lawyers, and those who wish to argue against a patent being conferred on someone. For example, a search for

“PublicInventionDisclosure” GPS tractors

would locate any idea disclosed in this manner, relevant to the use of GPS techniques with tractors. Putting the first string in double quotes in the search-string would make searching and reading through the reported results, very fast.

Would this parallel system have any legal standing? Does it need it? We need to listen to patent lawyers on this. I believe that if the system is used by a few thousand inventors, litigating lawyers would make this system very effective. The main advantage of the system is that costs nothing in the way of effort, if the inventor is going to publish his ideas in any case. Adding the declaration at the bottom is all that is required.

I would welcome comments and suggestions from everyone interested.

Srinivasan Ramani