I do have a question... If Counter is free, what is the revenue model? How will you sustain the platform? Although it's open source, it seems to be a SaaS platform that runs on your servers.
Yes, so although it is optimized to be very cheap to operate many users there still are costs. We hope to get that via donations or as it's communicated in the website "Pay what you want". One single advertising banner is also something we are considering. So the amount we have to get from active users is really low. Currently there are 80 integrations with multiple sites on the cheapest linode VPS. The redis database is 2 megabytes on disk and the CPU does not go over 1% usage (before this HN post). If you just take our current integrations and divide them by the costs the VPS makes you get to pennies per user per month. I did not put in my calculation that not all integrations are active but you get the idea :-)
I don’t have a problem with it. This prevents a private entity from monopolizing a possibly world-changing invention. The government can auction licenses to create competition, or even give it away for free.
This kind of technology would be so world-changing that I can't believe anyone with the knowledge and capability to develop it would actually allow something like patent law get in their way. Whomever gets this working basically becomes a godlike power compared to the rest of humanity. Who cares what the lawyers say at that point, let them try to subpoena you at the Mars colony that houses your space fleet.
I think it's more about preventing international private entities from profiting. AFAIK, they would get the same anti-monopoly effect just publishing about it because nobody can patent prior art.
U.S. patents are only enforceable within U.S. territories. And if the tech truly were break-through, even if the patent were enforceable outside the U.S., no foreign government would comply.
The best way to prevent a private entity patenting an invention and monopolising it themselves, is to patent it first. Proving prior art is notoriously difficult and patent reviewers frequently overlook even obvious examples, but pre-existing patents are impossible to ignore. So the government patents them to preserve broad access to the invention.
> So the government patents them to preserve broad access to the invention.
I would assume or at like to believe this is true with federal government patents, but it's not true for state governments, government-funded universities, etc. It would be nice to have a law or official policy to point to that states outright that the federal government can't or won't sue anyone for using the technology in those patents (or the opposite).
Used to be you could negate a patent by citing prior art. The date of invention, not the date to file was important. Now that has changed. Date of filing is all that is considered. Previously I can show my signed and dated notebooks to prove I was first to invent in a patent challenge. That's no longer the case.
If I invent something and don't patent it, Bob might come along and patent it instead.
Alternatively I can file it as a trade secret, where there's documentation I invented it, but no public disclosure. So I don't get patent monopoly protection, but I can prove prior art if someone else tries to patent it. This wouldn't work for public research that isn't a secret.
Government research filings mean that someone else who didn't invent it won't be able to patent it, or at least as easily.
Patent examiners rely quite a bit on earlier patents to determine if something is new. They are not experts in all unpatented but invented research taking place in all fields, so filing this patent helps the PTO block similar patents filed later by other parties.
Also, having a patent portfolio of impressive things as the inventor of record, even if some other entity owns the patent, is very useful to your career. It's comparable to having a track record of published papers in prestigious journals. So allowing inventors to document their inventions with patents is likely useful in terms of attracting talent. A government agency, as employer, being owner of the patent, also prevents the inventor from going off and patenting it on his own after no longer working for that agency and thus privatizing the invention.
This used to be the attitude within government. However, it has changed, and this is for the better.
It is quite rare that government R&D is sufficient to demonstrate that a particular technology is commercially viable. Without a patent to license to a private entity there is little changc such an entity will invest the time/money to perform this R&D. They need that patent protection to raise funds.
Prior art is very difficult to prove and patent reviewers often miss obvious examples. They can't so easily ignore a pre-existing patent. It also protects the invention from exploitation by foreign competitors, in jurisdictions with reciprocal patent protection.
It depends, obviously. Prior art is easy to prove by pointing at an existing patent. It is also easy to prove by pointing at an article in a mainstream publication in the local language. So "protective publication" or "defensive disclosure" is a reasonable alternative to getting a patent (and perhaps letting it expire at the first opportunity).
Prior art is only difficult to prove if you're relying on something along the lines of folk knowledge among the indigenous peoples of the lands where the Jumblies live.
It's non-obviousness that is notoriously difficult to prove.
Prior art doesn’t apply in foreign jurisdictions. A country that is first-to-file can file the patent then stop your domestic company from using the tech.
> Prior art doesn’t apply in foreign jurisdictions.
Can you elaborate on this? Japan, for example, requires you to disclose any prior art during application similar to the U.S. Israel recently adopted similar rules. These disclosures frequently include US and foreign (WO, EP, etc) patents and patent publications.
> A country that is first-to-file can file the patent then stop your domestic company from using the tech.
Assuming you filed first in your domestic country, then you just apply in the foreign country and claim priority from your domestic application - thereby granting your application an even earlier effective filing date.
If you publish a design, it becomes prior act, and nobody can patent it. You can even do that in the patent office without filling a patent, making them the registration of your design, without patenting it.
It seems clear to me that what they want is to appropriate someone else design because I do not believe they have a working prototype of this.
From the DoD scientist point of view there are only so many ways to show productivity. Showing productivity is required for raises and receiving funding for projects. (National/DoD labs basically function like universities.)
It's really either papers or patents, and patents are generally counted equivalent to two papers.
While I think discussing whether military research should be patented is an interesting question, I think the nature of this particular patent (that is, that it’s total nonsense) kind of trumps any speculation here.
What happened to the web's early vision of an information superhighway, an open repository of data that could be linked, shared and remixed?
The efforts (and lawsuits) to lock down and control data on the public web threatens to stifle innovation. Websites are only valuable because they're connected to the internet, which for all intents and purposes, is a general utility. It was funded by the U.S. government, and is now managed by a consortium of NGOs such as ICANN, W3C, etc.
When you publish a website, you're distributing it to the world. It's similar to when you publish a book. It has always been the right of those who buy and read a book to be able to use the facts contained therein. Although readers are not allowed to steal the creative elements, they have a basic human right to use the facts however they desire. And the medium doesn't change this truth -- whether you read the book yourself, ask your friend to read it out loud, or employ a bot to read it. So it should be with websites.
Data placed on the public Web is accessible by everyone and should be usable by everyone. It shouldn't matter who parses the page's HTML, whether it's a person, a web browser, a bot or a robot.
We're starting a movement to ensure that the facts of the world are always available for innovators to build on top of:
Might be a coincidence but we included it in this week's JavaScript Weekly on Friday: https://javascriptweekly.com/issues/425 .. we probably saw it come up somewhere else though. One of those organic things.
I do have a question... If Counter is free, what is the revenue model? How will you sustain the platform? Although it's open source, it seems to be a SaaS platform that runs on your servers.