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Comment by hiccuphippo | Hacker News Reader

Would it be feasible for someone to form a non-profit organization who's only goal is to find prior art for patent applications and kill them before they become one? Maybe as a branch of the EFF or something? Would the patent system allow for such thing to exist with the current rules or do the rules need to be changed in the first place?

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This could certainly be done. The biggest hurdle is money and people. There just aren’t that many patent attorneys qualified to do this kind of work, and most are not terribly idealistic types. In other words, you’d have to pay them at least semi-competitively. Just the filing fees alone for an IPR are ~$20k. I’d work on killing bad patents just for funsies, but I imagine there’s not many if any other attorneys out there that know how to do this kind of work and are unencumbered by an existing law firm. FWIW, most attorneys who get paid to do this stuff absolutely suck at it, I’ve seen it first hand. The few who are good at it are doing it at law firms that wouldn’t allow them to work on something like this.

https://www.uspto.gov/patent/initiatives/third-party-preissu...

USPTO is now first to file, not first to invent. Prior art becomes less and less useful over time.

Why do people keep repeating this? First-to-file versus first-to-invent has nothing to do with the patentability of an invention. It concerns who gets the patent if two substantially-similar but otherwise patentable inventions are submitted for patent at the same time.

According to my understanding, the current US patent system is often summarized as “first inventor to file” meaning the named inventor must believe herself to be the original inventor.

Prior art is still relevant WRT patent prosecution. The AIA made several changes to patent law, perhaps most notably making the effective filing date the determining factor for purposes of applying prior art, instead of the invention date. This means interferences no longer occur. There are also now different post-grant procedures for challenging patent validity.

Source: am a patent agent Disclaimer: this is not legal advice

Thanks, I definitely misunderstood the change.

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