At last! A patent attorney willing to teach us how to find prior art. Here's a wonderful new aid. PubPat has released a How To, on finding prior art. It's an audio file, with an accompanying PDF, which has slides to help follow the talk and then the patent he uses to teach the process. Here's the Ogg file. And here is the MP3. The PDF is here. The MP3 is 43.6 MB. I wonder. Should we cut it up into segments for dialup users? If so, any volunteers would be welcome. Patent law is a legal speciality, and it's not my speciality, so I've been asking lawyers in the field to help us. The help is now here, and there will be more coming. The important point is this: searching for prior art isn't quite as simple as you might think. PubPat's Executive Director Dan Ravicher explains the difference: "To be worthwhile, the prior art has to be exactly the same or any differences between it and the targeted patent have to fall within the judicially narrowed concept of obviousness that exists in patent law today, which is much, much less than what most reasonable technologists would consider obvious." If Microsoft or one of their friends does, in fact, bring a patent infringement action against GNU/Linux, maybe against Samba or OpenOffice or Wine, or whatever, we need to be ready. The time to learn is now, before it happens, so if and when it does happen, we can quickly be effective. I'm learning right along with you, so let's get started. Here's PubPat's press release about the teaching aid.
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Digging for Truth