I love the fact that he has his own mailing list instead of a blog. The internet continues to surprise me every day.
http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-March/0...
Also touches on the discoverability problems with using mailing lists like this. I wish I'd been reading this list thirteen years ago when it was started.
> I want my list mail to serve as prior art to stop obvious patents from being granted, or to revoke them or the obvious claims in them in court
Do discussions of ideas really count as prior art, or must there also be at least an effort of implementation ("reduction to practice" according to wikipedia[1])?
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/usc_sec_35_00000102----000...
It's tricky, though, because that's the invention date, not the filing date, and the "inventor" could lie about the date of the invention. The safest approach is to publish my ideas in print in a foreign country, ideally in a small print run in a language spoken by nobody at Intellectual Ventures, and then wait a year before posting to the list.
Prior art does not have to include a reduction to practice; conception of the invention is sufficient. Lore has it that Charles Hall's waterbed patent was narrowed substantially by a reference to Stranger in a Strange Land, which described waterbeds.
but if you used a centralized server for your blog, wouldn't the date/time stamp of that server provide the same information as a mail server would?
In other words: wouldn't that file/database entry timestamp (ie: wordpress' time -- just an example/name of a blog not necessarily available at that time) serve the same purpose?
Thank you; that's a wonderful compliment.