Protective publication against patent trolls
Open Source is especially vulnerable to patent lawsuits — open source projects are often created by non-profit organizations or a small community of enthusiasts who have neither the money nor the time to patent their technical solutions. Hosting provider Rackspace is using OpenStack , a set of open virtualization technologies, to create a cloud infrastructure, and legal costs have recently become an increasing concern.
To protect itself, and at the same time a good and necessary open project OpenStack, Rackspace decided to adopt the strategy of the so-called defensive publication - carefully document and publish all technological solutions and algorithms that are used in the open source software used in the company. Rackspace placed an order to write such documentation on the Elance freelance website.
Applicants are requested to compile descriptions of technical solutions used in OpenStack that meet the requirements of the Priorartdatabase website, which is used by patent examiners to search for existing solutions when checking applications for originality. After the publication of such descriptions it will be impossible to patent them.
At one time, IBM also resorted to security publications - from 1958 to 1998 it published the IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin. In this edition, inventive descriptions were published that IBM for some reason could not or did not want to patent, but feared that they would be patented by competitors. This newsletter has been widely used for searching prior art - references to it are mentioned in various US patents nearly fifty thousand times.
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To protect itself, and at the same time a good and necessary open project OpenStack, Rackspace decided to adopt the strategy of the so-called defensive publication - carefully document and publish all technological solutions and algorithms that are used in the open source software used in the company. Rackspace placed an order to write such documentation on the Elance freelance website.
Applicants are requested to compile descriptions of technical solutions used in OpenStack that meet the requirements of the Priorartdatabase website, which is used by patent examiners to search for existing solutions when checking applications for originality. After the publication of such descriptions it will be impossible to patent them.
At one time, IBM also resorted to security publications - from 1958 to 1998 it published the IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin. In this edition, inventive descriptions were published that IBM for some reason could not or did not want to patent, but feared that they would be patented by competitors. This newsletter has been widely used for searching prior art - references to it are mentioned in various US patents nearly fifty thousand times.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/288368/
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