Wired recently published this article about a website Google maintains where its employees and others can post about ideas and inventions. Its primary purpose is to document ideas that might be valuable but aren’t worth spending the money on to patent. The end goal is to establish “prior art” for the ideas posted in order to prevent others from potentially filing patents for similar concepts. Wired goes on to discuss the history of the strategy of defensive publication, and highlights that a unique attribute of TDCommons is that it is free to post there.
While a free database seems like a great idea, unfortunately due to its small presence in comparison to more prominent paid databases it seems like it might not be making as much of an impact as it might otherwise be. I do also wonder if trying to prevent others from patenting something that you may not actually develop into something useable for the general public is always a good thing for innovation or overall societal progression.
The Canadian Intellectual Property Office provides some information about prior art in the Canadian context, which “consists of all information/documentation that has been disclosed with the public about an invention before the filing date of the patent in question.” According to a practice note by Gowling WLG s. 28.2 and 28.3 of the Patent Act deal with prior art, and prior art related considerations don’t vary much between the US and Canada.
You can visit Google’s website, Technical Disclosure (TD) Commons, here.
Communications Law