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by choxi 855 days ago
Has anyone tried doing that without LLMs? Could you make a GitHub repo under MIT license and just let people add a list of ideas to serve as prior art?
2 comments

Corporations have long had house journals where they publish inventions they didn't patent, just to ensure no one else patents them. I think AT&T in particular had one of these.
Ideas can't be prior art. Only specific implementations of ideas can be (patented).
Patents can cover generalizations, not specific implementations. If it were the latter we wouldn't have all these obnoxious software patents.

However, a specific implementation in prior art can prevent a generalization that includes that specific implementation from being patentable. As a result, patents tend to become more and more specific over time, hemmed in by prior art.