Blue skying means sitting around with friends and sharing what-if ideas. Maybe it’s a way to cure diabetes, or to make scattered blood sugar results mean something, or to prevent or treat retinopathy, or a software program that could help deal with diabetes. Whatever it is, this is the place to share it.
Why? Blue-skying is what corporations do, but with one major difference. Large corporations have lawyers and patent attorneys who patent good ideas for economic benefit. The idea could be used in one of their products, sold to another company, or simply placed into their patent freezer for 20 years. A patent is a novel, nonobvious improvement in a device, design, or type of plant. The idea must be adequately described in clear and defininte terms so that someone else can make it.
The U.S. patent office argues that when we have more patents, more innovation follows. The E.U. appears to agree. Unfortunately, this theory is not true according to information provided by FFII, the Free Information Infrascuture. One example of this is the 26,000 patents owned by Microsoft, which appears to be preparing to start filing patent infringement suits against the Open Source Movement to shut down software programs like Linux, Apache, and Sendmail.
In diabetes, existing patents appear to be hampering progress toward better control, particularly in enabling easier-to-use software interfaces and the exchange of information.
What can you do? Well, you can do some of your own blue-skying here. Share any novel idea or approach that you wish. We only ask that you spend some time on the idea and give it legs that would allow others to bring it to market. How your idea works and how to bring it into reality are critical. You do not need to search to see if it is already patented, but try to avoid recreating an existing idea.
What is the benefit to you? You get credit for a creative idea in a public forum, i.e., when you share it here it becomes “Priori Art.” If your idea has not already been patented, it goes into the public domain with a time and date stamp on it. Your idea becomes public and this makes it harder for others to patent.
John Walsh has done some blue skying of his own. Take a look at these articles: