(no subject)

[morwen]

Given how software patents turned out (we are still mopping up the damage and it has set technology back years) perhaps someone should start a website accepting user submissions for specific ideas for how 3D printers and other rapid manufacturing technology could be used in the future; so that when these parasites start patenting things that can be predicted in 2013, then they can be shut down by pointing to this as evidence of quite how obvious they were.

Thoughts, anyone? Maybe this already exists?

Comments

[pseudomonas]

My initial thought was that a lot of that could be automatically populated, but that starts going all Accelerando.

[morwen]

Heh.

I think for the benefit of the future, we should actually prove that a human can invent this stuff. We need to be as clear as possible to future patent trolls that this stuff was trivial to think of now, not just have it coincidentally in an automatically generated list...

[pseudomonas]

I wonder if an automatically-generated list would be legally-enforceable as prior art.

[x_mass]

that might work in europe which respects prior-art
but not in the states which has moved to a first to file system not first created by. But the US got going as an industrial power by stealing other people patented machines (for example spinning and cloth making) so this really is nothing new

apparently we are already running into patent trolls in relation to 3D printing with insanely wide blanket patents that are so utterly obvious to be unpatentable anywhere but the US. I remember the first development of 3D printers and weavers back in the eighties which means by now most things should be out of patent anyhow but...