<story><title>Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-google-is-patenting-work-he-put-in-the-public-domain/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hamami</author><text>I think it would be useful if there was a patent type for &amp;quot;free for anyone to use&amp;quot;, something like the MIT License in open source. This would make it easier for patent officers to discover and reject applications conflicting with prior free to use patents and offload the burden of keeping track of this from the inventor to the patent office.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maxk42</author><text>Well it used to be that no action was necessary to prevent someone from patenting something you&amp;#x27;ve already invented and released publicly: The first person to invent it had the right to patent or not patent it, and nobody else.&lt;p&gt;A few years ago we switched to a &amp;quot;first-to-file&amp;quot; system and this is a direct consequence of that.  Someone who didn&amp;#x27;t invent something can now file a patent.  Doing so is a lengthy, expensive process, so the immediate consequence is there is no more &amp;quot;public domain&amp;quot; inventing.&lt;p&gt;This needs to be reversed.</text></comment>
<story><title>Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-google-is-patenting-work-he-put-in-the-public-domain/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hamami</author><text>I think it would be useful if there was a patent type for &amp;quot;free for anyone to use&amp;quot;, something like the MIT License in open source. This would make it easier for patent officers to discover and reject applications conflicting with prior free to use patents and offload the burden of keeping track of this from the inventor to the patent office.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>temporalparts</author><text>There are such things as defensive publications, which prevents others from patenting something by providing a publicized proof of prior art.&lt;p&gt;But most companies would rather just patent something.</text></comment>