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Welcome to Anti-Patents
It is the conviction of the founders of this site that property rights are fundamental to a healthy society, and must be protected by the government.
However, current patent laws and their implementation by the government offices in the United States and elsewhere actually infringe on the rights of individuals to use their own minds to create products, solutions and services.
Patents have become a tool used by individuals and especially large corporations to prevent others from creating and innovating.
This site is dedicated toward preventing future litigation against individuals who choose not to apply for patents for their ideas, either because they lack the funds, or because they consider the idea inappropriate for a patent.
- It currently supports creating publicly visible, dated preventive art teachings, or "anti-patents."
- If there is a sufficient demand, it will support creating secure, encrypted and optionally searchable "dark anti-patents."
Either kind of anti-patent can be used to prevent future legal action by providing evidence of publication and priority.
Many of us have had ideas that we don't think we'll be able to afford applying for patents for, or that we fear others may be granted patents for, even though we don't think the idea deserves patent status. If you have such ideas, feel free to post them here, to prevent others from one day getting a patent for your idea.
Please contribute your thoughts, after you register.
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Automatic, Timeboxed Whitelisting
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 Many websites today confirm member registration through email, but such email are often classified as spam or junk by customers' email programs.
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Video Trackpad
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 One of the main obstacles to adopting computing experiences more thoroughly in the home is providing sufficiently good, but simple and suitable, input devices and interfaces. To use a computer-like set-top-box, for example, we may use a remote control. But, we could go even simpler, now that CCD devices (webcams) are becoming ubiquitous on "media center" devices.
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Synchronized Web Server and Client Modifications
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Companies such as NetFlix.com pioneered the use of various tricks and techniques to send information to and request information from a Web server without redrawing a full Web page in a browser. One essential idea was that even a read-only request to a Web server could actually convey information to the Web server, and even a statically formed request could actually return dynamic information to a Web client, based on contextual state on the Web server.
Originally, this was possible by changing the source attribute of an image on a page, which would cause the browser to fetch a new image and refresh the page display. In some browsers, images could even dynamically change size this way.
Later, more advanced techniques were made possible by the introduction of XML requests, Cascading Style Sheet advances, and enhancements to the programmatic access to a Web page in a browser through Javascript (e.g. through the introduction of the second Domain Object Model for web pages—DOM2).
Currently, these techniques are referred to by the acronym AJAX, which was recently coined and received great acclaim, largely due to the popularity of features developed by Google, which use these techniques in tasteful and powerful ways.
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Fitting Frames for Glasses
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 Trying out frames for new glasses is a stressful tasks for people with poor eyesight. Since the new glasses have not yet been created, one can't look through them into a mirror to see how they look on one's face. Some ways of dealing with this involve:
- Bringing along a friend or relative to judge the frames aesthetically.
- Judging the frames through one's old glasses, in the air or on someone else.
- Hoping one will look like the models wearing the frames.
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Opacity Inversely Proportional to Density of Elements
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Suppose you need to display an unknown, large number of elements in a limited space. Common approaches used today are, for example:
- Use a flat, scrolling vertical list (as in most OSs).
- Use a horizontally and/or vertically scrolling matrix (as in most OSs).
- Hierarchically decompose the content with a) a tree view (common in Microsoft Windows), b) side-by-side flat scrolling lists (common in Smalltalk and Apple's Macintosh OS X), c) discrete zooming steps and links or jumps between levels (common on the Web), d) named, recursive directories (common in DOS and Unix), etc.
- Searching and filtering (common in search engines and databases).
- 2D or 3D zooming displays (common in mind-mapping software). Some 2D and 3D projections add differential shaking or animation to distinguish elements.
Each of these approaches has pros and cons, some of which depend on the type of information being displayed.
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Understandable, Clear Patent Summaries
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When you need to do a patent search, e.g. because you have a new idea, or you are being sued for patent infringement, decrypting actual patent documents can take a long time, and be very inaccurate.
Some patent attorneys, for example, will use simple keyword searches to find matching documents, and let applicants or subject matter specialists do more exact, and excruciating, searches by reading patent documents.
Patent documents are written in a manner that satisfies legal criteria, but is not actually clear to subject matter specialists. Wording is often broadened to try to widen the applicability of the patent, and huge amounts of nonessential information is included, such as arbitrary lists of computer technologies used for storage, access, editing, etc.
Getting to the essence of a patent is often very difficult, time-consuming, and error-prone.
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Information Escrow and Dark Anti-Patents
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A person with a new idea has essentially three options today:
- Apply for a patent, for about $10,000 per idea.
- Keep it a secret, and hope that his or her journal will suffice as evidence of prior art should anyone else apply for a similar patent. Then monitor any new, related patent appliations and try to stop them.
- Publish the idea in order to establish a public record of prior art.
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Viewing Displays Outdoors
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Viewing luminous displays outdoors is difficult under strong light conditions. For example, using a laptop computer outside on a sunny day is almost impossible using today's display technology, since the light emitted by LCD displays is very weak compared to ambient light.
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