Rough estimate of complexity

OK, so I count 18 pages plus a generic administration tool for the database, plus the database. According to Start Small Stay Small, that gives me something like 240 hours of work ahead of me. I'm not sure how true that is, but I'm damn well going to find out.

Rough feature list

So. Depatentizing should feature:

• A home page for each patent in question
• News searches related to the patent (i.e. what impact the patent is having)
• A description of the claims of the patent
• A way to post prior art in a way that's not just the forum
• A way to post bounties, with escrow
• A way to submit bounty claims
• A single PDF retrieval for a report on a given bounty and all activity related to it at any time, in whatever format is useful for attorneys (like I know!)
• Specific abuse cases posted in a way that's not just the forum
• Forum/commentary on any primary object (patents, news items, prior art submissions, bounties, abuse cases, and bounty claims that have specifically been posted as open)

That's all I can think of tonight. More will probably occur later as I flesh this out.

Analysis of BountyQuest (I)

This is just going to scratch the surface here, but the Wayback Machine has pretty good records for BountyQuest from 2000 to 2003 when it closed. (In 2006 the domain was parked, with the same image it has now. Kinda weird.) Here's the index.

The central focus is the bounty. Since a bounty seems to correspond 1-1 with a patent, I'm just going to call my central table the "patent". Whether a bounty gets posted or not is immaterial.

The "how to read this page" instructions for a specific bounty basically tell us the table schema that BountyQuest was using. (Incidentally, look at the amounts of money in play here. Staggering.)

BQ used Coolboard.com for a forum provider. The titles and structure of the boards are stored, but not the individual content, sadly.

The submission form is also not archived (it's behind a post button, for some reason - perhaps because it contained the bounty number?)

But at least we know the structure of a bounty at BQ!

History

Back in 2000, Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly put together a neat-o site called BountyQuest. I remember it quite well (although I was shocked to realize how long ago it had been), and when a couple of patent outrages took place this year, I was shocked again to realize BountyQuest had gone away (Tim O'Reilly explained why in 2003).

Depatentizing is meant to be kind of a revival of the concept. BountyQuest was the attempt to start a business on this; Depatentizing is just going to tick along on its $20/month Linode instance with a hat out.

Oh, I'll put in a bounty system, just in case. But I'm not focused on a business model; I want something to serve as a focus for patent abuse cases.

Welcome

This is a stream-of-consciousness blog regarding my development of Depatenting.com. It's going to overlap to a certain extent with the semantic programming blog because this site is intended to be a showcase of the techniques I'm evolving there, but this will focus more on the minutiae of the Depatenting site itself and my thoughts as I wrestle with actually producing something.

The target architecture for Depatenting is standard LAMP (P=PHP here) and there may be some fancy Javascript if I can manage to make it make sense. It'll probably host on Linode; during testing I'll self-host it on my development machine, but once it hits usability it's getting its own digs.