Dan’s blog

One of the more “controversial” pieces of the current Patent Reform Act of 2007 is the first-to-file provisions.   Part of the reason for this controversy is a misunderstanding of what it actually does when compared to our current system (first-to-invent).

In the current system, if two people file for a patent, something known as an “interference” is declare.  From there, both sides spend a lot of money in a bunch of complex court-like proceedings trying to prove who invented the thing being patented.  Whoever wins the interference proceeding gets the patent.  There are large battles over interferences, and there are law firms that specialize in handling them, because they can get quite complex.

In the proposed first-to-file system, if two people file for a patent, the one who filed first gets it.

That’s it.

Moving to a first-to-file system would have absolutely no effect on what is considered prior art.  If you go and publish something, it does not mean that someone can go and file a patent on it if you do not.  Your publication will still be prior art against their patent.

The real reason for first-to-file is to get rid of the weird system of interference proceedings we have, not to try to make more things patentable.

I’ve seen a lot of people complain about the size of SVN repositories.  The one thing all these people  share in common is that they are using repositories converted to CVS2SVN.   There is a reason for this:

CVS2SVN has a habit of misidentifying entire-branch copies.   As a result, you will usually end up with branches that are as big as the original branch (on-disk size wise), rather than being , say, 1000 bytes.

This is not to say that SVN repositories are great at space usage.   But as a rule of thumb, proper SVN repositories are always smaller than the equivalent CVS repository.

SVN has some problems in terms of repository storage formats.  We know this.  This is why SVN will probably going to move to something like revlogs for 2.0.  But a lot of the specific size problems i’ve seen complained about on the web or mailing lists, are usually just bad conversions.