#388 patent troll defense via prior art

[Anonymous]

Originally created by: athanclark

1. Defensive publication: probably your strongest option
   Because OpenChronology is already publicly available on GitHub⁠, you have a potentially powerful form of protection: prior art.
   Under 35 U.S.C. § 102, publicly available technical descriptions can prevent someone else from obtaining a valid patent on an invention already disclosed before their effective filing date.
   However, publicly available source code doesn't necessarily disclose every important technical mechanism clearly enough for patent purposes.
   I would recommend adding a section to OpenChronology's documentation that describes its original technical innovations, particularly:

Arbitrary-precision rational time representation and associated algorithms.
Efficient indexing, retrieval, and modification of large timelines.
Any novel aggregation, grouping, or rendering techniques that improve performance.

Explain the algorithms sufficiently for another developer to implement them, including data structures, constraints, and ideally benchmarks.
Publish these explanations in dated, publicly accessible technical documents. Preserve GitHub releases and publication history as supporting evidence.
The USPTO recognizes publicly accessible electronic publications as potential prior art, provided the required accessibility and disclosure standards are satisfied.
This doesn't invalidate earlier patents or prevent someone from suing you, but it can help prevent later patents on what you've already invented and disclosed.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: athanclark

Status (2026-11-06): the defensive publication this issue asks for is in place. docs/disclosures/ (commit d7734bb, "Technical disclosures: OpenChronology's mechanisms in implementable detail") describes eleven mechanisms in enough detail to implement them, as a dated public record:

• exact rational time;
• the augmented AVL indexes stored as rows;
• history as rows with read-through forks;
• summaries and clustering;
• the viewport cache;
• time presentation;
• the plugin interpreter;
• log ingestion;
• time mapping;
• the desktop file format.

What's left needs the maintainer's own accounts or action ("Keeping the record" in docs/disclosures/README.md):

• Software Heritage: request an archive with Save Code Now, either at https://archive.softwareheritage.org/save/ or with curl -X POST https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/origin/save/git/url/https://github.com/openchronology/timeline-app/.
• Optional, Zenodo: enable the GitHub integration, so each release gets a DOI.
• Optional, Technical Disclosure Commons: submit the disclosures there.
• Repository settings: immutable releases, and a tag ruleset that blocks deleting or moving tags.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_011fFY8eruEi1xAkkMBni13B