[Noisebridge-discuss] advice on PCB patents?

[Marc Juul]

On Saturday, April 29, 2017, Josh V <josh at foolishproducts.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> Thanks for having this discussion.  I'm going to jump in, as I've also
> been trying to make sense of this boondoggle, and perhaps this is a good
> outlet to test my thinking.
>
> First off, let's establish that property is theft
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOTs3nRVfV0>, and that the existing
> system has been gamed to a point where it's a parody of itself.
>
> Secondly, let's establish that not open sourcing your software establishes
> an adversarial relationship between you and the people who are hiring you
> to make a thing for them, impinges on their freedom, and creates bad habits.
>
> After you've shipped your thing, "do what tho wilt shall be the whole of
> the law <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelema>", or at least, thats how
> I feel it should work personally.  Fuck that keurig/juicero/... late
> capitalist noise.
>
> On the other hand, it would be brash to totally ignore the reality of the
> world in which we live, lest you get eaten alive.
>
> To this end, the legal ethic which seems appropriate is that if an
> organization with orders of magnitude more access to resources than you
> decides they are interested in your work, they should also have to pay for
> it (on the order of what it would have cost them to develop the project in
> house).  These large organizations have already committed to VC fueled
> growth, and it seems like the only reasonable way to engage with them is on
> their terms.  The language that these organizations speak is tied up with
> the patent system, and being able to say that you've applied for a patent
> creates legal uncertainty for them, which gives you leverage to extract
> from extractive organizations.
>
> To this end, my feeling is that if your circuit is sufficiently
> complicated (i.e. something you've been working on for a year+), my
> understanding (happy to be convinced otherwise) is that open source
> hardware leaves too much on the table.  It doesn't actually increase
> individual freedom of the end users too much (as with circuit boards with
> lots of surface mount IC's there's only so much rework anyone can do, even
> if they have the schematic).  Not releasing the schematics is bad for
> individuals interested in learning/playing - but you can encourage them to
> contact you directly if they are curious in reproducing the results for
> themselves.
>
> Not releasing the hardware, however, seem to be another requirement of
> acquiring a patent on a circuit (at least so far as I understand).
>
>
Not sure what you're referring to here. In the U.S. you have one year to
patent after public disclosure. In some other places any public disclosure
before patenting makes patenting impossible. Some open licenses include
language about patents and others do not. As far as i know there is no
reason why you couldn't patent your stuff and then make it open though that
openness could be questionable unless the open license explicitly grants
right to use your patent, which then would probably make your patent fairly
useless except for the purposes of putting the prior art in the uspto
database.



>
>  Patent in hand, you then have the leverage to band together with other
> similarly minded organizations (like the effort described here:
> https://www.adafruit.com/patents), in a way that you wouldn't if you
> simply posted the schematics online.
>




>
> idk.  It's also an expensive and complicated road, and by the time people
> have already started selling lots of copies of your design, you've probably
> already distributed lots of versions yourself, and so in lots of cases, it
> does seem like the suggestions everyone else gave are best?
>
> I'm kinda rambling, please tell me I'm wrong about things.
>
> josh
> foolzone.com/lets-get-lost
> whoaboard.com
>
>
>
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