Prior Art Share emerged in 2008 as an open collaborative effort to document technological innovations in a setting that invites the participation and cooperation of the public. With the ever-accelerating pace of technology, it is critical to provide a resource for documenting, finding, and building upon non-patented prior art. In the past, innovations were easier to identify, date, and assign to a specific creator. As the world of software and electronics blossom, technologies evolve daily making it increasingly difficult to identify prior art. Patent systems have fallen prey to the abusive practices of illegitimate patent seekers who are able to gain control over technology that they did not create, with great detriment to those attempting to bring new ideas into the world.
This project is spearheaded by individuals at Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Yahoo, and the Internet Archive. We are supported by volunteer contributors who come from diverse industries and backgrounds. But we all share in common a passion for transparency and innovation, as well as a desire to prevent the stifling of creativity and fair use of ideas. We are working together to create a massive database of information that inventors and the public may use to record and reference the unprecedented period of human creativity we are currently living in.
We believe that in order to sustain the breathtaking acceleration of technology that humanity has achieved, an open, public effort to protect a creative environment is required. This need is so fundamental that it transcends the goals and desires of any one person or organization. Our goal is to preserve inventors’ intellectual property rights, to help defend against invalid patents, and to work with other initiatives to promote a healthy creative environment in the fast-paced technological era.