I’m Kit Walsh, an attorney at theCyberlaw Clinicat Harvard’sBerkman Center for Internet and Society。We have been working with theElectronic Frontier Foundation帮助防止过度广泛的专利发布3D打印技术。我们使用一种新程序，该程序允许公众提交相关的先前出版物的示例，以便专利审查员可以更好地确定申请人是否要求提供比根据法律应得的更广泛的知识垄断。
我们认为，当审查员意识到创新者已经发布了什么并且不会出于无知而授予过分广泛的专利时，专利制度的功能最佳是相对毫无争议的。因此，我们很惊讶地读霍尼克先生和布山女士的critique of our project in 3D Printing Industry本月初。这是我对这篇文章的回应。
Hornick and Bhushan correctly lay out some of the relevant facts: “3DP has been around for over 30 years and has been widely adopted and developed by thousands of Makers and the industrial sector” and there is “tons of prior art.” We were excited to read their conclusion that the submission of prior art “could reduce the number and breadth of patents that issue in the 3DP space” and indeed “any technology” using the crowdsourcing model you see on询问。我们当然希望如此！
If giving examiners relevant prior art would reduce the “number and breadth” of patents, that means they are currently issuing overly broad, invalid patents because they do not know about critical information that’s been published. Examiners have limited time and tools needed to find prior art, and we have noted别处that 21st-century innovation often happens on email lists, code repositories, web forums, and other non-traditional publication platforms that are harder for examiners to search.
一个人可以辩论是否现有的专利法律扼杀和惩罚创新远不止他们帮助，但是对于专利局而言，由于对先前的批判性艺术的无知，授予专利专利是一件坏事，这是一件坏事。国会和专利局在创建并实施预发行程序时意识到这一点，专利局确保该程序仍然受到禁止第三方在其提交中提出争论的限制。如果您阅读我们的意见书，您会发现他们非常干燥，裸露的解释，我们希望引起审查员的注意力。实际上，丹尼斯·克劳奇（Dennis Crouch）argued专利办公室有点太远in restricting the content of preissuance submissions. In any event, the patent office certainly does not allowmore比法规所要求的。
预防提交程序邀请公众帮助专利审查员，而我们又渴望帮助公众这样做。随着项目的继续，我们将分享我们学习的课程，并进一步介绍我们所做的成功提交的示例。您无需成为律师即可使用该程序，也无需提交三个或更少的参考资料。感兴趣的技术专家只需花费时间简要指出出版物的相关部分并将其材料上传到专利办公室，就可以帮助提高专利质量。
将此与massive costs与脆弱，过度的专利专利以及几乎每个人都显而易见的令人毛骨悚然的效果以及优势是显而易见的。
