[Fsfe-ie] U.S. Office Joins an Effort to Improve Software Patents, by John Markoff, NY Times, 10 Jan 2006
Joseph Kiniry
kiniry at acm.org
Tue Jan 10 11:25:26 CET 2006
Hi all,
I thought this would be of interest to list readers.
Has anyone tracked these proposed software projects?
Joe
---
Joseph Kiniry
School of Computer Science and Informatics
UCD Dublin
http://secure.ucd.ie/
http://srg.cs.ucd.ie/
---
The New York Times
January 10, 2006
U.S. Office Joins an Effort to Improve Software Patents
By JOHN MARKOFF
The United States Patent and Trademark Office plans to announce today
that it will cooperate with open-source software developers on three
initiatives that it says will improve the quality of software patents.
The patent office has come under increasing pressure in recent years
from critics who contend that it issues patents without adequate
investigation of earlier inventions. As a result, conflicts over
published patents have loosed an avalanche of intellectual property
litigation.
At a meeting last month with companies and organizations that support
open-source software (software that can be distributed and modified
freely), including I.B.M., Red Hat, Novell and some universities,
officials of the patent office discussed how to give patent examiners
access to better information and other ways to issue higher-quality
patents.
Two of the initiatives would rely on recently developed Internet
technologies. An open patent review program would set up a system on
the patent office Web site where visitors could submit search
criteria and subscribe to electronic alerts about patent applications
in specific areas.
The third initiative is focused on the creation of a patent quality
index that would serve as a tool for patent applicants to use in
writing their applications. It is based on work done by R. Polk
Wagner, an intellectual property expert at the University of
Pennsylvania.
"This is a great example of how the patent office can reach out to
the community and how they can help us where we have difficulty
getting prior art," said John J. Doll, the commissioner for patents.
The patent office has held similar discussions with other technology
industries including biotechnology, nanotechnology and
semiconductors, he said.
The open-source project, being led by I.B.M., aims to build an
automated system for creating a series of categories to organize
software written by open-source programmers. The system would then be
made available to help patent examiners search for earlier examples
in patent applications.
Mr. Doll said that Google had participated in the discussions and it
was possible that its search technology would be used in the project.
Jim Stalling, vice president for intellectual property and standards
at I.B.M., said, "We think that this initiative will lead to greater
certainty in the patent system." He added that any improvement in the
general quality of patents would lower the costs of defending
patents, and that money could again be focused on financing research
and development.
One frequent critic of the patent system, Gregory Aharonian,
publisher of The Internet Patent News Service, said it was unlikely
that the new initiatives would have a significant impact, because the
patent office was not able to deal efficiently with the information
it already had.
"If the patent office can't figure out how to use the resources they
already have," he said, "what is the point?"
Diane Peters, general counsel for the Open Source Development
Laboratories, a corporate consortium backed by Linux supporters, said
that if the initiatives were successful it might lead the patent
office to issue fewer but higher-quality patents.
Separately, the patent office plans to announce today that I.B.M.
once again topped the list of private-sector patent recipients in
2005. The company received 2,941 patents last year, compared with
3,248 patents in 2004.
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