The Patent system has significant shortcomings. Among these is the fact that the costs of new innovation is forever climbing because the inputs themselves are often patented – this compounds over time in a nested chain of legacy costs.
Getting patents is expensive and requires legal expertise. Many inventors are untrained and are working class, and so their innovations often go unpublished for lack of funding.
Anti-Patent is a term that I coined in 2024 that means any enabling publication of an invention which is published into the public domain/creative commons or equivalent, especially with the intention of preventing any entity from patenting the same idea.
An anti-patent is a publication that grants the inventor a provable moral ownership of the invention (they get credit for being the first to publish the idea) and precludes everyone (including the inventor) from ever patenting the invention. An anti-patent is a forfeiture of the inventor’s right to patent the idea for themselves, but it also makes the idea un-patentable for everyone else. An anti-patent immediately injects the invention into the public consciousness for anyone to elaborate, improve upon or even sell, without legal or monetary hurdles of any kind.
Anyone is free to make, use, develop and even sell embodiments of an anti-patent (even to incorporate it into a for-profit business), without any licensing fees. Attribution is requested, but is not required (I would like to see develop an ethos of moral ownership and folk-hero status as an alternative to wealth).
Some inventions are not well-suited for this kind of publication. Pharmaceuticals, for instance, require such large capital expenditures (clinical trials, etc), that patents meaningfully de-risk the R&D efforts. For pharmaceuticals, publishing a promising new drug as an anti-patent could actually preclude its deployment because no company will want to pay for the clinical trials if they can’t enjoy a 20-year monopoly on the drug. For pharmaceuticals, anti-patents may be counterproductive. But this is not a typical market – most markets have drastically lower capital barriers to entry.
The inventions that I believe are best-suited to this kind of publication are pro-social ideas that require low capital expenditures to realize. These traits makes adoption broadest and most impactful.
One of my forthcoming projects is to build and facilitate a website for myself and others to pool anti-patents into a database that is searchable by patent examiners, publicinventions.org. I (we?) want to build a network of ideas that meaningfully block patent actions in appropriate emerging markets so that innovation can better flourish in those markets.