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I think it's time for a crowdsourced patent challenge web site run by the USPTO where there would be a period of public comment for each patent about to be awarded in order to help underpaid (and I imagine under-resourced) examiners find Prior Art.

A lot fewer patents might be awarded, but ones that are would be genuinely new -- this might also save the world billions of dollars.

http://peertopatent.org/

Copyrights and trade secrets protected the software industry just fine before the USPTO opened the flood gates on software patents in the early 90's. They should stick to the original intent of the constitution, and protect the free flow of ideas by banning patents on mathematical algorithms (which includes software, IMO). They should not overturn the patents they've granted - that would harm the companies that filed them - but going forward, patents should cover something more than what can be executed in any mainstream computer language. If I can violate your patent simply by writing C code, it should not be patentable.

Software patents have resulted in:
The Open Invention Network
Peer to Patent
Oracle suing Google over Java
37 Android related patent suits
Nearly killing RIM
Linux patent suits ...

I'm afraid we're at the point where the anti-software-patent people warned we'd be. Small companies live in terror of being sued over any software they write. Big companies waste billions of dollars in court. Coders like me intentionally "code dumb", to avoid accidentally using a patented software idea. It's a terrible waste, and it makes me very sad to see America throwing away it's software innovation lead in this way. Thank God software patents weren't around when we wrote so much of the software that still powers the world. If they were, we'd all still be renting time on IBM mainframes. Just imagine a world where Donald Knuth patented all his ideas.

That's not the case. In addition to the internal stuff the examiners do, the USPTO also has the peer to patent project to crowdsource prior art on participating patents.

US version: http://peertopatent.org/

The problem is that this approach is the world upside down. The correct approach would be that the polluter pays: make patent applicants put a certain amount of money into escrow (more and more general claims = larger amount of money), and if prior art is found then this money goes to the person/institution that dug it up (either the patent office or a third party).

This way you compensate people for spending their time on rooting out bad patents/claims, rather than more or less forcing them to do it for free because otherwise they may be badly affected by the granted patents.

http://www.peertopatent.org/video/pj/pj.png

Why don't they use Beth Noveck's Peer to Patent http://www.peertopatent.org/ which they've already tested?

http://www.peertopatent.org/

Remember these patent filings can take 5-6 years. So you need to ask if it was novel back then.

But your point is taken. I recommend people interested stopping non-novel patents try this website.

http://www.peertopatent.org/

How is this different from the USPTO Peer-to-Patent initiative?

Another organization: Peer-to-Patent (aka Community Patent Review)

• Website
• Article

Currently a pilot project, renewed once per year, as long as it's useful.

I haven't seen the program, but if they intend to harness the "Wisdom of the Crowds", the signal-to-noise ratio is going to be a problem.

www.peertopatent.org

That is the link to sign up and become a reviewer.

dotank.nyls.edu

That's the code of conduct, which lists conduct rules, moderator privileges, and the information contributors are required to provide.


Apparently there is a voting system.

That's going to be an interesting thing to watch. They're relying on the bulk of contributors defining the most appropriate content, kind of like slashdot.

How well does that work anyways?

I think the real problem is that there are underlying issues with the patent process that people are abusing.

Software patents are a good thing. What is bad is that some of the BS software patents that get in. The main failing points that I have seen are.

- BS obvious patents (obvious after the fact is patentable, but these are before).
- Prior art out the wazoo but hidden.
- Resubmitting same patent multiple times with slight changes (seriously! you can see them in google if you look hard enough)
- Submitting to certain offices knowing that they would go through faster/easier.
- Interns reviewing patents.

Now for those that don't like patents the easier way to combat them is review those coming up for prior art. Check out: http://www.peertopatent.org/

Or if you have a cool idea that you believe should be free for all, publish it instead.

While I am tempted to agree with you, I don't think punishing the patent examiners is the issue. According the to the reports I have read is that the patent office is overworked, underfunded and suffering from huge turnover. What we need is more support for reform projects such as the Peer to Patent Project.

http://www.peertopatent.org/

There should be a better framework for weeding out the bogus patents by allowing experts in the field to decided what is obvious rather than a patent examiner with 5 years of work experience and little knowledge in the field of the patent.

from the comments of TFA:
http://www.peertopatent.org/
A joint project with the USPTO and NYU Law School that tries to public input on pending patents. Interesting and potentially very good idea.

My example of a geostationary satellite is one example where someone tried to patent an idea and the patent was rejected on the grounds that Arthur C. Clarke had fully described the invention in a previous story.

What exactly was this geostationary satellite patent trying to claim? For anything I've ever read about in science fiction, using the description provided by the author would make very poor prior art material. Generally the disclosure necessary to support useful claims requires a level of detail that far exceeds anything you'd find in a work of fiction. Working out all the details and disclosing them, provided they were new, useful, and nonobvious, is what earns you the patent. Merely propounding on the possibility of geostationary satellites without providing the necessary information to reduce them to practice would not constitute prior art for an otherwise valid patent application.

I was referring to a different writer (forgot his name) who around the end of the 19th century said we would communicate using a network of satellites made of bricks and powered by water.

The pre-granting discussion/prior art system I was referring to is http://www.peertopatent.org/, which is being done in cooperation with the USPTO and seems to so far be doing a reasonably good job.

Effort put into the pre-granting review process is wasted. Simply, it's not where our system has problems. The particular site you link to is garbage (no offense). Very few comments I've seen there demonstrate understanding of the legal concepts involved and many misunderstand the technical subject matter. There are several companies looking at methods for automated rating of patents which, if applied to patent applications, could flag some for additional scrutiny. Beyond that, though, having an army of people who don't understand prior art, novelty, or obviousness and who can't properly read a patent review applications is just going to create more work for the already overburdened PTO.

There's also a legislative effort underway to greatly expand the pre-granting review process within the PTO, which is what I was referring to. It's a waste of resources because the problem isn't bad patents being granted, but bad patents being used in litigation (and good patents being misused in litigation).

Patents are just pieces of paper until litigated, when they give the patent holder the ability to impose huge costs on their party opponent with very little exposure. This allows a patent holder to extract millions of dollars in rents using patents that, even when valid, don't read on the target subject matter. Bluntly, a perfect system that granted only valid patents would have very little effect on troll activity.

Before a troll can prevail at trial, his patent will have to survive a challenge to validity several million dollars in the making, brought by an interested party who has focused those resources on the specific nuance of the patent that covers his accused product. That's where review really happens in our system, and it's an incredibly efficient method for focusing the overwhelming majority of our review resources on those few points of disagreement that actually matter. I'd guess that every patent on that website combined gets less effective scrutiny in a month than any one claim gets during litigation.

The problem with the current system is that people can take advantage of these high defensive litigation costs to engage in rent seeking. A true "troll" very rarely goes to trial, as he knows his case is garbage and that the real value is in allowing the other side to dig themselves out for less than their anticipated defense costs. The way to fix this inefficiency is to expose patent plaintiffs to risk of loss while giving incentive to patent defendants to invalidate or otherwise defeat bad faith claims in litigation. An appropriately written bonding statute would make current pre-gr

I'm baffled by your response. My example of a geostationary satellite is one example where someone tried to patent an idea and the patent was rejected on the grounds that Arthur C. Clarke had fully described the invention in a previous story. The pre-granting discussion/prior art system I was referring to is http://www.peertopatent.org/, which is being done in cooperation with the USPTO and seems to so far be doing a reasonably good job.

>>> How do these patent claims differ from normal drag and drop? In pretty trivial ways if at all, but it may be hard for a patent examiner to understand that trivial changes in drag and drop user interface are not in fact novel enough to warrant a patent.

Firstly I think you're confusing novelty and "inventive step". Something is either novel or not, there are no degrees of novelty. . It's very easy to create something novel, by collocation for example, but there must be a synergy between the elements as any application can only cover one "invention". The inventive step is the difference between the "state of the art" and the patent being considered, whether that step is obvious is often the crucial point.

Looking at the claims (eg http://peertopatent.org/patent/20070234226/overview; assuming they are copied correctly) then they seem to follow a pretty standard formula. Often (and in certain jurisdictions there's a benefit in this) the first claim is intended to be too broad. This means that the applicant gets an extra period of time for amending the patent before it can be granted and hence before fees have to be paid. Other reasons for broad claims are to get an overview of a field from the examiners perspective - they site a spread of patents that knock out your claim 1. The claim 1 in this case is to broad for this however.

The claims then branch off, methods, devices, systems each incorporating or excluding details of what might be the envisaged product. This way the broadest possible scope of monopoly is sort - it's an adversarial system really. So the article is bunk when it claims to be fighting overly broad patents - the applicant wouldn't want claim 1 to stand as such a patent wouldn't be enforceable as it's clearly invalid wrt the prior art.

Now back to that quote "trivial changes in drag and drop user interface are not in fact novel enough to warrant a patent". Well the issue if indeed the steps are minor is that drag and drop interfaces are used by a plurality of users in a plurality of places (!). So the field is extremely well worked. A very minor change therefore is critical, it could easily corner the market. Say the change from a static to a dynamic "wait" cursor (egg-timer) - a minor alteration but a very significant one. Now we say such a change is obvious, but we have to assess this question from the time of filing (or more properly the priority date) and from the perspective of the man skilled in the GUI art and in possession of the common knowledge of the GUI field or research. Do citations in the field mean you could produce that inventive step without being inventive. Is it plainly obvious.

In any well worked field it appears to me that it's perfectly reasonable to argue that any small feature that can't be hit for lack of novelty must be inventive as otherwise it would appear in the prior art. That argument can't easily be refuted; though I think it lacks rigour, personally.

FWIW.

[I was a UK Patent Examiner a few years ago.]

After skimming through the patent, it seems the "smart" component of this is in bringing the possible drop targets within close proximity to the object being dragged. I vaguely remember reading about a system of that nature in one of my SIGGRAPH conference proceedings a few years back. I don't have time to look it up right now though, as I have to get to work. Maybe later tonight, unless someone else can find it first.

Current patent qualification process has the pitfall that the administration officers can't be the experts for every *patent*. They may have no service such as this in their local Papa John. If a prior art does exist but wasn't found during qualification process, the dispute is resolved through law procedure. I think what we can do is to find some http://www.peertopatent.org/ like sites to provide more prior arts.

It's not hard to find patents that re-represent human interaction as a piece of software and they to be resolved through law suits if a dispute has occurred. And I can't agree more that real-world interactions should be listed as a reject principle when qualifying a software patent.

Software is very different from real-world. In the real world, you can give the movie DVD to your friend and have no problem. But in software world, if you want to share the mp3 you bought to your friend and delete your copy, shall this be legal or illegal? It is just different and the law makers should actually used the technologies before digital world bills are voted.

Wow, someone who seems to understand the meets and bounds of the claim and proposes actual potential prior art. Now we just need to obtain some dated documentation. Great job!

It's hard to blame the examiner for not knowing about an obscure audio program that wouldn't turn up under more generalized searches. This is why the Peer to Patent project has some potential at fixing the problems with software patents.

http://www.peertopatent.org/ is where it is at, and they have a mailout list that will keep you informed on new patent apps.

Although I haven't seen one where my knowledge could affect the process, the very first time I hear of a patent application that I can attack with prior art, I will do so immediately.

That way things like this patent don't get so damn close to being approved before we can jump on it.

This one is actually a patent application, not a patent. Also this is part of the Peer to patent pilot, so there is a chance to give feedback on it before it is approved.
The p2p discussion is online right here

So anyone can respond to this...there is still time!

Nice...

5 applications online, 22 instances of prior art submitted.

While everyone's favorite seems to be Method, apparatus and computer program product for providing status of a process, I had to laugh at Database staging area read-through or forced flush with dirty notification - it's pretty much a description of how every memcached/SQL plugin works. I guess somebody should mention that.

Apparently, if you make the description sound complex enough it will pass initial review.

It's good to see this kind of a process come to light. Three cheers for Beth Noveck.

Nice...

5 applications online, 22 instances of prior art submitted.

While everyone's favorite seems to be Method, apparatus and computer program product for providing status of a process, I had to laugh at Database staging area read-through or forced flush with dirty notification - it's pretty much a description of how every memcached/SQL plugin works. I guess somebody should mention that.

Apparently, if you make the description sound complex enough it will pass initial review.

It's good to see this kind of a process come to light. Three cheers for Beth Noveck.

Nice...

5 applications online, 22 instances of prior art submitted.

While everyone's favorite seems to be Method, apparatus and computer program product for providing status of a process, I had to laugh at Database staging area read-through or forced flush with dirty notification - it's pretty much a description of how every memcached/SQL plugin works. I guess somebody should mention that.

Apparently, if you make the description sound complex enough it will pass initial review.

It's good to see this kind of a process come to light. Three cheers for Beth Noveck.

Nice...

5 applications online, 22 instances of prior art submitted.

While everyone's favorite seems to be Method, apparatus and computer program product for providing status of a process, I had to laugh at Database staging area read-through or forced flush with dirty notification - it's pretty much a description of how every memcached/SQL plugin works. I guess somebody should mention that.

Apparently, if you make the description sound complex enough it will pass initial review.

It's good to see this kind of a process come to light. Three cheers for Beth Noveck.

Sign up to be a peer reviewer. I can't seem to find what kind of requirements exist to be able to participate in this, but it couldn't hurt to register if you feel this is important.

Microsoft, for credibility will have to produce a detailled list of said patent violations (and eventually a list of specific OSS application that they think are infringing).

You can search the USPTO for Microsoft patents. I suggest that you then register with the Peer to Patent Project. If Microsoft decides to go to war, it will be fun to watch them get dismantled groklaw-style.