kleptog@svana.org (Martijn van Oosterhout) writes:
> On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 03:07:17AM +0930, Shane Ambler wrote:
>> Exactly. The real problem is that the first one to apply for a patent
>> gets it. It really doesn't matter who invents it. If we have patents
>> that cover our work then we can control who uses it and for what
>> purpose, also preventing others from patenting our ideas and stopping us
>> from using them.
>
> There are places that offer cheap alternatives which are not patents
> but more "declarations of prior art". The point being not so much that
> you get a patent but that you prevent others from getting one on the
> same thing. As in the patent office will actually use it when
> determining prior art, rather than just ignoring anything on internet.
>
> Cheaper, but still not cheap....
My understanding is that this is one of the reasons for existence of
the _IBM Systems Journal_; IBM occasionally discovers things that, for
one reason or another, they do not wish to patent, but by publishing
such things in a published journal, that provides a well-documented
source of "prior art."
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/
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