In an attempt to stem the tide of bad patents, a new service is offering a unique solution. PriorArt.org was formed as a coalition between intellectual property firm IP.com and open-source group Foresight Institute. The founding organizations claim that patent rights to technology have become so lucrative that many people are filing flimsy patents, just as claim jumpers produced bogus mining deeds during the gold rush. PriorArt.org lets inventors register and release ideas into the public domain, within a centralized database.

In legal terms, prior art is public disclosure of an idea's originationa piece of key evidence to refute would-be patents for similar concepts. PriorArt.org specializes in free registration of ideas in the software and nano-technology fields.

Such registration, however, bestows no direct legal rights to an idea. Also, PriorArt.org requires that submissions go directly into the public domain, so creatively minded people can't register an idea, then patent it later.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office offers a similar yet little-known registration service for prior art called the Statutory Invention Registration (SIR). According to Gregory Kavounas, a patent attorney with the law firm Marger Johnson & McCollom in Portland, Oregon, fees associated with the standard SIR filing tally near $1,000, although filing a standard $400 patent application carries about the same weight. The U.S. Patent Office declined to comment for this story.

Kavounas supports any attempt at a centralized, searchable prior-art resource but emphasizes that PriorArt.org runs a privately held database. If PriorArt.org goes under, your registration may disappear too.

"The real question," says Kavounas, "is, if you're going to register an invention, why aren't you going to the Patent Office? You can have your bragging rights, but the Constitution says you can also make money at the same time."

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