Prior art constitutes all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent’s claims of originality. If an invention has been described in the prior art, a patent on that invention is not valid. (Wikipedia)

Wikinventions ensures that all inventions submitted to the database are turned into prior art, thereby rendering them unpatentable. This is achieved in a three-step process:

1. Proof of existence

Any documents submitted or images uploaded to Wikinventions are timestamped via the Bitcoin blockchain. This is done through OriginStamp, a trusted timestamping service: The submitted documents are used to create hashes, which are ultimately combined to create a new Bitcoin address to which the smallest transactionable amount of Bitcoins (0.00000001 BTC) is transferred. As a result of this transaction, the hash is permanently embedded in the distributed Bitcoin blockchain. After the transaction in the blockchain has completed, it is impossible to alter the timestamp of a hash, and anyone in the world can easily verify the hash on sites like originstamp.org or blockchain.info, or by using the blockchain itself.

2. Proof of publication

At the time of publishing, all inventions are submitted to the Internet Archive, thereby proving that they were actually accessible online at a given date and time. The Internet Archive is a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form, storing hundreds of billions of webpages with their according time stamps.

3. Proof of circulation

Wikinventions keeps detailed traffic stats for each invention page, proving that the particular invention has actually been viewed by visitors from around the world. Statistics are tracked via Piwik web analytics with GeoIP enabled.

After an invention has been published on Wikinventions, the results of this three-step process can be viewed in a box underneath the invention.