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The Software Patent Institute is often acronymed down to SPI, which is usually the popular three-letter-acronym for Software in the Public Interest. Modern times can certainly be confusing. While Software in the Public Interest is an organization devoted to free software, the Software Patent Institute is an entirely different organization, providing free use of their software technology patent database on the Web.

Featuring hard-hitting sponsors like Microsoft, IBM, USENIX and the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the SPI database features a vast amount of free information culled from (among other sources) old manuals, textbooks, journal articles and conference proceedings. The entire database is searchable by over 20 criteria, including old standards like author and publisher, but including extended fields for operating system and execution hardware. If you look hard enough, you can find documents in the database dating back to 1955. There are over 1.2 million 'pages' of information in the database, broken down to about 10,000 bytes each for ease of transmission over the net.

As for the fiery software patent issue, SPI dodges the bullet with this statement from their mission and endorsements page:

'The Software Patent Institute has among its members some who believe strongly in the desirability of patents for software-related inventions and some who are strongly opposed to patents for software-related inventions. SPI deliberately takes no position on this issue, or on any particular patent or litigation. We believe that there is a current lack of readily-available information concerning software technology, and we are attempting to help solve that problem.'

The free software movement is extremely anti-patent; the boycott on Amazon is merely the latest strike on the software patent institution. Recently I had the chance to speak to SPI's Executive Director Ronald Cole about the Institute and its policies. "We've had a number of cases where people have come up to board members and told them that the activities of the institute would not help, but make things worse," Cole stated, "Passion runs deep in the technological community. Having been a child of the sixties, I understand the 'if you're not with us, you're against us' mentality, and we've gotten that from both sides. To us, of course, that's somewhat reassuring. The companies that sponsor us do so knowing full well that the information we provide may help someone on the other side of one of their [patent] disputes."

The SPI also offers courses to the United States Patent and Trademark Office four to six times a year, working with their software training specialists to build a curriculum for the USPTO Patent Academy training program.

The Software Patent Institute is not a new being; they've been active for the past eight years. "We actually got started in 1992. We became an independent non-profit in August of 1994. The database come online fairly soon after we started, either late in 1992 or early 1993."

So, what's next for the Institute? "Two things have happened over the course of the time we've been in existence. The [software patent] issue has not gone away. It has increased in importance, and so has the widespread recognition of its importance. That's helpful."

"The second is the amount of technological change that has been helpful to our efforts. The Internet wasn't really an option when we started. We started out with some help with various remote control programs; we were planning to run a modem bank. The ubiquity of the Internet made it possible to provide a collection of content much, much easier. You should think of our database as a card catalog, rather than books on the shelf. We strip out graphics, and only keep information in HTML formatted text. There are some systems that do similar kinds of things in political science and they store images, but if we do images, we go from 20 kilobytes per page to several megs a page. In pure text we can get that down to a few hundred bytes. The technology is not there to offer everything it may be useful to offer. We are one of the groups that would take advantage of broadband access; it's not just for movies. In the meantime, it's a lot more feasible than was conceivable in 1992. The second technological change [that has helped us] is dramatic improvements in imaging technology."

New OCR technology alone helps the Institute transfer more documents to the Web; they're currently chugging along with a scanner that moves about 70 pages a minute. The Software Patent Institute database is available on the Web at http://www.spi.org. Use is absolutely free, provided you're willing to 'click through' an agreement.