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Comment by kourt | Hacker News Reader

There should be a non-profit organization that files arbitrary new patents preemptively on behalf of the public and then release them into the public domain.

Good idea. Let's call it "Bell Labs".

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A note of clarification, but there's actually no reason to patent something if you're going to release it into the public domain. Patents are an incentive for disclosure, so if you write a paper on the subject and never patent it, no one else can patent it later.

Or they can patent it anyway verbatim and say that your previous idea is not prior art. Do you disagree? Let's meet in court.

It takes less than 5 minutes for someone to tell if a published work (particularly in a journal) is prior art. As long as it was made publically available before the priority date (the date the provisional application was filed anywhere in the world [that is a party to the Paris Convention IIRC]) then it's clearly prior art. Any judge would throw out the case.

If you patent something then they could also take the patent document and copy it verbatim and patent it and say, "That patent isn't prior art."

There's really no difference between publishing your ideas in a public, searchable forum and patenting them, except that you get monopoly rights in the second case, but not in the first. Trolls can still leverage the cost of legal services against you whether you have a patent or prior art.

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