My reaction as a patent practitioner is
that this web site, despite the good intentions of its creators,
is likely to do far more harm than good.
The paradigm user is the inventor who gets the impression that he
or she (a) can publish and (b) can now relax and postpone the
pesky business of filing a patent application for almost a year (a
so-called one-year "grace period"). As another poster (Ted
Sichelman) points out, ill-advised reliance upon this one-year
grace period can lead to the problem of a third party reading the
publication and filing a prompt patent application on slight
improvements thereof.
But it is likely to be far worse than that for some inventors, due
to a different problem, namely the irrevocable loss of any hope of
patent protection in most countries of the world outside of the
US. The great majority of countries around the world have a
grace period that is not one year, but instead is negative one
day. By this I mean that if the inventor publishes on a
Monday and contemplates filing outside of the US on the subsequent
Tuesday in a given country, it is (depending on which country we
are talking about) too late to file the patent application and all
possible patent rights will have been lost.
A defender of this "disclose early and file your patent
application later" approach might say "oh, don't you realize, the
inventors that this approach is intended for are the inventors who
won't ever want or need patent protection outside of the US, but
will find their business needs more than fully served by US patent
protection alone."
Inventors who might imagine that they fall into this category are
many, but most are mistaken.
Example 1. The inventor who may eventually seek an
investor to help commercialize the invention. The first or second
due diligence question from the mouth of a potential investor will
be "did you get your patent application filed chronologically
prior to your first public disclosure?" The answer had better be
"yes" or the potential investor will likely drop the inquiry and
go find some other inventor who was not so unwise. Only if the
answer is "yes" will the potential investor feel that foreign
patent rights are still potentially available. The inventor who
says "see how smart I was, I publicly disclosed my invention in a
highly visible way that is easy to find, almost a year before
filing my patent application" will be shown the door very
quickly. Indeed the potential investor who sees that the inventor
got this part wrong will figure that the inventor probably also
got other things wrong that are not as easy to sniff out.
Example 2. The inventor who looks to get rich by
selling or licensing the invention. Suppose it's a better way to
make paper clips. The would-be licensee who catches on that all
foreign rights were lost will probably say "thank you for showing
me a better way to make paper clips" and will set up the paper
clip factory in Mexico or wherever.
Yes I am aware that there are a handful of countries outside of
the US where you get a very limited grace period (often much
shorter than a year) for your own disclosures.
The creators of this web site could do a great service to the
inventing community if they wish. They could develop and post a
detailed survey of the 180 or so countries of the world that have
patent offices, listing for each country the nature and duration
of the filing-after-publication grace period if any. Potential
users of the publication feature of the web site would then have a
clearer sense of how many countries' patent rights would be
irrevocably lost by such publication and the relatively few
countries' patent rights that might remain in prospect despite
such publication.