What is missing from the Open Source paintball movement... (my opinion)
This is more philosophical in intent, but a HUGE part of what lead to the proliferation of the open source software movement was the clarification of the lines of copyright and licensing. In the paintball industry our equivalent is patents. Paintball patents are an absolute disaster. There are overlapping claims, claims that were pre-dated and others that flat out will not work. I, for one, am tired of manufacturers hiding a genuine lack of ingenuity behind the threat of patent litigation.
So, there are a few major keys I'd like to point out:
- Prior Art - If the claim was predated with an existing design. (Maddman valve has this written ALL over it.)
- Reasonably Obvious (to someone in the field) - I'm not sure this is much use, but the dump valve spool varieties should fall into this category.
- Technical Errors - I would be willing to bet that most patents in our industry are based on pseudoscience and could be discredited here easily.
- Failure to Disclose - I have been reading patents a lot lately and they must include the other similar items; most don't.
- Due Diligence - They can't randomly start enforcing a patent... whoever owns the patent would be all over a new product that hits the market using *their* technology. Again, dump valves cross my mind.
- Filing (Procedural) Errors - Unless someone here is a patent lawyer, I'd leave this to the pros.
So what I'm saying is that in order for the open source paintball movement to progress we need to define our sandbox a little bit. My suggestion on how to do this is to build a paintball patent repository, categorize them by the major claims (valve, bolt operation, etc), and as a community start taking notes on what is covered (correctly) and where we're free to explore. I'd see this almost in a major spreadsheet that shows: category, patent filing number, official filing status, major claims, and a COMMUNITY status commentary. I'd be willing to bet that there are only a select few significant patents that would be left standing. This would really allow the open source paintball community to expand in breadth.
Thoughts and opinions?