Ian Lance Taylor wrote: > > Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1999 09:43:04 -0400 > From: John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Ian Lance Taylor wrote: > > > One easy and relatively inexpensive way to publish an algorithm with a > > legally verifiable date in the U.S. is to register it with the > > U.S. copyright office. You can send them a program listing, and they > > will basically file it with a timestamp. > > Sorry, not enough. For patent purposes, the invention must be > described in openly available literature. Registration with a > government agency doesn't cut it, as nobody (in practice) can obtain > the listing. Publication on Usenet or the Web serves the necessary > purposes: the algorithm must be *available* to persons learned in > the art. > > Yes, you do need to do more than merely register it with the copyright > office, and you are correct to point that out. I assumed that that > had already been taken care of in this case since the algorithm in > question is part of a free software package. > > However, as far as I know, publication on Usenet or the Web rarely > provides a legally verifiable date. It's not like an appearance in a > published magazine. I suppose you could try subpoenaing the records > of deja.com or google.com. > > Ian Here is the answers from what I understand There are 2 problems 1- Prove that you are the first inventor In order to do so, you need something which gives you an official date. A simple way to do that is to register with any kind of copyrigh office. There are other protections. In France, you can send some kind of sealed envelope (enveloppe Soleau) to the Patent office. They will make a whole in the middle and never open it. It can be used as a very strong proof in case of trial. There are other ways to get the same result. This has been used by AT&T. Take an article describing your invention. Compute an MD5 code from it. Then publish a list of MD5 codes in any newspaper. Even better : compute a big MD5 code from a list of MD5 codes and publish it as a classified (that's really cheap). Being the first inventor in the US enables to cancel a patent filed by someone else later (first to invent principle) Being the first inventor in Europe anables to use the process in case someone else files a patent later but does not allow to cancel it (first to file principle) 2- Make a document public Well, this is much easier actually. Just print the document and go to your local library. Give it to them and get some paper to prove later that you gave the document to your local library. If the title of the document includes some MD5 number, it makes it easier to proove that the content was what is is intended to be in case the local library loses the document. This trick is used quite often by multinational companies which go to Senegal (Africa) and put some kind of book, which looks normal outside but actually includes some secret patentable process, in very small libraries. The intent of such behavior is to keep things secret (patents force to publish), while still being protected in case someone gets a patent later. Because the document is public (a library is public), the process it decsribes will be considered as public prior art and any patent filed on the process will be cancelled in case of trial. There is a famous story saying that one day, Sony, Philips and Thomson representatives went the same day at a local library in the belgian countryside to ask the librart manager to certify that a certain article was displayed in the library a certain day. Jean-Paul. webmaster of freepatents.org and other sites PS. MD5 is a coding technique which generates a big number from a long article. It is very hard to generated a different article with same MD5 number.
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