Thanks for your detailed response. Yes, it would be good to have a kind of repository where people could submit their ideas or designs in order to prevent future patents. Somewhat like copylefting code.
This has been tried a number of times, and none have succeeded.
The reality is examiners have a very small amount of time.
Somebody has to do the work of verifying submissions, and making it reliable, and they don't have time to look through large sets of maybe unreliable data.
It's not enough to just submit an idea, you need the date the idea was conceived of, as well of some verification that this occurred.
Comments
Thanks for your detailed response. Yes, it would be good to have a kind of repository where people could submit their ideas or designs in order to prevent future patents. Somewhat like copylefting code.
This has been tried a number of times, and none have succeeded.
The reality is examiners have a very small amount of time. Somebody has to do the work of verifying submissions, and making it reliable, and they don't have time to look through large sets of maybe unreliable data.
It's not enough to just submit an idea, you need the date the idea was conceived of, as well of some verification that this occurred.
This is exactly right.