I finally have a topic that I’d like to share with the entire group. I’ve got to give everyone a bit of background in order to make my larger request, so I extend my gratitude to those who read this entire post.
I was recently in Bozeman, Montana to work on a remote sensing project I’ve been trying to get off the ground for the past couple of years. While there, I had the chance to hear a talk by a professor at Montana State University who served as an expert witness in an IP/trade secrets case Google filed against Uber related to autonomous vehicles.
Essentially, the professor was hired to help rebut Google’s assertion that an Uber subsidiary was infringing on roughly 100 intellectual property claims.
Whatever your opinion of Google, Uber, or self-driving vehicles, the underlying issue goes straight to the point of why I’ve been working to support open hardware and software for the past 15 years.
Upon looking at Google’s claims, the professor’s response to many of them was, “Come on, we do this stuff all the time in the lab!”
While I think many of us can relate to that sentiment when reading about some iffy patent - it is also very hard to demonstrate, in an adversarial legal proceeding, that certain practices really are part of the broader community’s knowledge base.
This imposes a sort of opacity under which we all work - academics, public researchers, private sector - where, because the “obvious” facts and phenomena we’re all familiar with go unenumerated, they become targets for appropriation by people with bad intentions, or often who simply do not know that they reinvented the wheel.
This leads me to my question to the group: does anyone know of efforts to raise the awareness of generally-known phenomena in their field of practice? Especially in a way that provides a defense against unjust claims of IP infringement. I seem to recall an effort by an organization in Ireland, but I was hoping for something U.S.-based.
And if something like that does not yet exist here in the U.S., does anyone want to talk with me about starting up an effort? I am fairly well-acquainted with issues related to seed/genetics (think Open Source Seed Initiative), and increasingly in optical technology, so I can bring that subject matter expertise to the table. Talk to me!
In a sense, I wonder if we might need something like a Prior Art Advocate, someone to argue for common knowledge in the patent process - a role with institutional authority, not just something that only happens when the lawyers get involved.
Anyhow, thanks in advance!