Interesting Patent Note: Reducing to Practice

One of the important elements in establishing prior art for challenging patents (a big deal these days as we're dealing with more patent trolls) is showing that the invention disclosed in the patent has been "reduced to practice" at some time prior to the patent's claims. Basically, if you can show you were doing a process or using an invention prior to someone making a patent claim then that claim can be invalidated even if you didn't try to patent the thing you were using.

In Solvay, S.A. v. Honeywell Int'l, Inc. the CAFC has affirmed a judgment that the person who reduces an invention to practice does not have to be the inventory. In fact, the inventor was even in another country and although they applied for a patent there (Russia) the foreign patent application wasn't key to this case so much as the fact that the information was communicated to others (in the US) who then reduced the invention to practice.

This is one reason why people interested in busting patents often search for examples of old running systems from the early days of computing. It doesn't matter who wrote the code behind, say, the PLATO chat system - the existence proof of that system is sufficient to invalidate many claims for modern social software.