[ih] patent licenses, not Why the six month draft expiration ?

[Scott Bradner]

if someone challenging a patent can find prior art from a year or more before the patent application
was filed then patent can be invalidated - first to file does not change that - first to file just means
that the person who thought of the invention first may not be the one getting a patent on the invention

Scott



> On Feb 3, 2024, at 7:17 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> About 12 years ago I was involved as an expert witness in a patent fight that had been going on literally for 20+ years.  The Patent Office had issued the patent and it had been invalidated and revalidated several times as the lawyers battled over the decades.
> 
> That was when the US system was "First To Invent", and prior art played a large role in challenging the validity of patents.  We use the Arpanet IMP as an example of prior art to invalidate the patent (actually just one of many claims).  The issue of whether or not the patent was actually valid (even though it had alrready expired after 17 years) was never resolved, because the litigants settled out of court.
> 
> At the time, I heard lots of discussions in the lawyer world about the apparent upcoming switch to "First To File" structure, and the impression I got was that the new structure would take away a lot of the complexity of finding prior art and litigating a patent's validity for 20+ years.  Prior art wouldn't matter.   The first patent filed would rule, and couldn't be invalidated by presenting some previously unknown (to the Examiners)  prior art.
> 
> I'm not in that world now, so I don't know how things actually changed after the 2013 switch to "First To File".  It seemed that such a change would make filing a patent much more important to establish ownership of some innovation.   It wouldn't help to search and find someone who had done it before, but failed to file a patent.  Whoever filed first legally owned the technology.
> 
> My impression of how the IETF operates now is that it creates technology (protocols, algorithms, etc) and puts them "on the shelf" for anyone to use.  But does the IETF (or anyone else) protect such innovations by filing a patent?
> 
> What's to prevent some patent troll now from taking whatever IETF puts "on the shelf" and filing a patent application for it?
> 
> Jack Haverty
> 
> 
> 
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