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Yes, it's now 20 years from the original file date.
http://www.spi.org/gatt.htm

The problem isn't that patents are bad, or that people are taking advantage of the system, it's that the system is currently misbalanced:

Agree.

1. Patents last too long. This is a general problem with IP law these days.

Agree when it comes to patents on things computer related - especially software. The pace of that industry is such that protection is only needed for a few years at most. (Product life cycles are about 6 years long - four of development, two of marketability before obsolescence.)

In particluar, it appears that software in particular doesn't require patent protection at all. By the time it can be reverse-engineered and cloned, the original product (if it was worthwhile at all) has typically made back its development costs and made a massive profit to more than adequately reward the developers and investors for their hard work and risk-taking. Further, at that point the originator is the dominant player in the self-created market, and it takes a major technological leap to displace him.

2. Patents are too easy to get. That is a particular problem with software. The nature of software in particular is such that any non-trivial program involves thousands of processes, any of which can be patented, and it's more-or-less impossible for a developer to even know if he's infringing when people can patent things like using the "tab" key to move between fields in a form.

An even bigger problem is that the prior art in software is not well known (especially to patent examiners, given that it wasn't patentable until recently so little of it is recorded as previous patents.) The Software Patent Institute is trying to solve that, by creating a searchable database of software prior art.

Looking for more about Bernie I happened to notice that he's the current president of the Software Patent Institute.

The SPI (which has both pro- and anti- software patent members) is attempting to solve the bogus software patent problem by making available a searchable database of software prior art.

This database, incidentally, is also a useful for anybody who wants to avoid having to reinvent a software wheel and to keep software breakthroughs from getting lost.

This is a site _EVERY_ developer should have bookmarked.

Search for software patents, or prior art.

-B

Try reading this 2001 paper by Mark A. Lemley:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID26 1400_code010313510.pdf?abstractid=261400

I found the conclusion especially interesting:

The PTO is rationally ignorant of the objective validity of the patents it examines. For the PTO to gather all the information it needs to make real validity decisions would take an enormous investment of time and resources. Those decisions can be made much more efficiently in litigation, because only a tiny percentage of patents are ever litigated or even licensed to others. Thus, we should resign ourselves to living with a system in which âoebadâ patents do slip through the PTO undetected. Recognizing that this is the case, however, should also prompt us to strengthen the validity inquiry made by the trial courts. Courts should not be ignorant of the facts, and they should not presume that a patent is valid merely because the PTO says it is.

Unless there are a great deal more patents on obviously invlaid patent occur, the likelyhood of requiring a higher level of quality patent examination is not going to happen. The SPI database (www.spi.org) is certainly helpful, and we should encourage businesses to willingly participate, to everyone's benefit.

Also, my understanding is that both the USPTO and the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) are implementing changes in preperation of mutual recognition of patents by 2004. This means that patent applications validated in one country will automatically be validated in the other. This will certainly help the USPTO, which recieves its largest chunk of foreign applications from Japan. The US might also be relying on the fact that the JPO also has a much lower percentage of applications that are ultimately awarded patents.

With Japan's focus on shifting towards a knowledge economy, and Linux taking a significant role in shaping independent software industries, the next couple of years are going to be quite intersting.

Adobe Software Patent Policy
Software Patent Institute Members

You do not recall correctly. Currently, the term of patents is 20 years from the filing date. At one time, the law was 17 years from the date of grant, and for some patents it is currently "17 years from grant or 20 years from filing, whichever is longer." But 17 years from the filing date never entered into it.

For more details see here.

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office:

Software Patent Institute

Bustpatents.com

invalid/withdrawn/pathetic software patents.

"Software Patents Tangle the Web,"

With billions of dollars in Internet sales at stake, the proliferation of broad e-commerce patents is sowing confusion, uncertainty and a good deal of cynicism among many software developers and business leaders. Some legal experts, such as Robert Merges, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, believe the sheer number of patents now pending on business methods has "pushed the patent system into crisis."

Tim suggests a slashdot-like site to post and coment on proposed patents.

There are already sites discussing the desirability/undesirability of software patents (eg, here), and at least one database of prior art. Rumor has it that ther is also a new-patent site somewhere, but I've not found it.

So, who's interested in getting the appropriate folks together with slashcode to build just such a site?

Here are my thoughts:

1. I would hope that getting an actual patent and using the Open Patent License would give the inventor as much protection against duplicate patents as an SIR would, (once everything's all finished and the license is in a usable state.)
2. If (1) is the case, and obtaining a patent is in the same range of cost as obtaining an SIR, then I would think (1) woiuld be the way to go.
3. If both obtaining a normal patent or a statutory patent is too expensive, then theoretically simply publishing the idea should be enough. However, you point out that it's not the case in reality, and we certainly have seen evidence of that! I wonder, however, how much effect submitting that same idea to the Software Patent Institute's database would have. (USPTO officially supports the SPI's database, I think. I was under the impression that they actually did searches there--although even in that case I'm not to optimistic that they'd even find a prior art for a bubble sort if the "inventor" didn't use the word "bubble" in describing the algorithm.
4. The fact that I'm pushing the Open Patent License means I'm sort of biased in thinking "Open Patent" should refer to something more than a patent equivalent of public domain, hence the immediate "No, no, no", and instant "Why would you want to do that" confrontational response. Next time I'll wait a few more minutes and edit the post again before submitting it.

There's a registry for non-patent prior art at the Software Patent Institute. The USPTO searches that database, which contains hundreds of thousands of old manuals, papers, and such. The emphasis is on "old"; though; there are over 1000 UNIVAC references, but only two Linux references. It's useful, though, in that most of the classic algorithms are in there somewhere.

Hmmm, the FUD mongering "embrace of death", the thankfully mostly reformed but previously anti-competitive Big Blue, ...., and the seemingly clueless USPTO. Why am I not reassured?

I like the fact that they have this huge database online, with lots of search criteria, but what good does it do when they admit that '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...'

Sounds more like they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them. I for one say this: make the SPI a non-corporate dominated non-profit which the free community can easily support, and which might even work as an arbitrator with the USPTO to resolve when a software patent should be given and when not. (Personally, I don't think patent law should be applied to 99.9% of all software, but that's slightly off topic.)

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.

Well (see preceding paragraphs), I should feel better now that I know that trainees are being trained...not to take a stand for or against software patents. Hello? What the hell happened to the government's responsibility to defend the common good?? which is mentioned nowhere in the SPI's statements. Just that companies might use the patent info against each other.

Use is absolutely free, provided you're willing to 'click through' an agreement.Well, I for one will read the agreement and all it's fine print before I click through. Okay, I read it. And admit that I need more legally minded folks here at /. to go over the darn thing and see if I lose any significant rights when I click through the damn thing.

Patents are expensive... I am in the process of working on a couple of software patents now. The only reason to get a patent is if that patent will make you money. pure and simple

If you want something to not be patentable just publish it and as many uses for it as you can. At that point you idea moves into the public domain and can be pointed at if anyone gets a patent that uses your idea, assuming they didn't have the idea first :-).

Take a look at: Software Patent Institute

By releasing your idea to them you are given the patent offices ear because this is one of the places they go when researching a software patent.

IANAL so you should still check with your own before taking any action with you intellectual property.

Maybe some organization to keep track of "prior art" would be helpful.

The Software Patent Institute keeps up a searchable prior art database, and they accept submissions.

Or there could simply be a non-profit organization that accumulates patents (as silly as possible) and then force companies to cross-license for all open source software.

I'm not out to force companies to do anything they don't want to do, but as far as the cross-licensing part goes, and all silliness aside, (parden the pun), I'm trying to promote the notion of a cross-license agreement at www.openpatents.org as a method of solving (some of) the problem of software patents.

If people who use their patents defensively could cross-license their patents with each other, that larger total portfolio could help protect them against patent lawsuits. (And of course they wouldn't have to worry about lawsuits among themselves. Well, at least patent infringement lawsuits about covered uses.)

...or sue Micro$oft for a couple billions...

Microsoft is one of the good guys on this issue. They have never used their software patents offensively. You can perhaps complain about them for other reasons and in other contexts, but IMHO it's not appropriate to complain about them as far as software patents are concerned.

Well, there already is such a thing. Check out the Software Patent Institute.

Now, actually getting examiners to use such a thing is another problem. But at least the database exists.

Didn't I hear about an Open Source Patent Project? Does anyone know how it's going?

If you are referring to my Open Patent License project atwww.openpatents.org, then it's still going. I'm getting comments and help from a few folks on the license, but I've slacked off on my contacts. (Been sick.) During the Holidays and especially right before Y2K is probably not the best time to be talking with legal folks at technology companies, so I'll probably hold off until after the new years to resume that. (Unless the world comes to an end *and* everyone starts suing one another. Then I'll hold off a couple more weeks. :-) ) Of course, if anyone has any patents or suggestions to contribute, there's no need to wait until after the new year to let me know, or to join the mailing list.

Have an Open Ideas Database where potentially patentable idea (however "obvious") can be made public and thus no longer patentable.

That's being done at the Software Patent Institute.

(As a side note, neither a cross-licensing proposal nor a prior art database needs limit itself to OSS-type ideas. The OSS/Free Software and proprietary worlds are both at risk by software patents, and IMHO any solutions to these types of problems should be inclusive of both groups.)

In my original post to Slashdot, boldly titled I Got News for All of You, I made the following rash, unsubstantiated claim:

Overlapping windows were thought up in the '40s, the mouse in the '50s, and WYSIWYG in the '60s, before PARC existed.

A clever Anonymous Coward noted that I was a dumbass and provided no references to back up my statements. Some might argue that merely saying, "You didn't document your sources so what you say is shit!" fails to constitute stimulating intellecutal discourse. It's nothing more than small-minded heckling.

Some might even suggest that you can provide a counter proposition of your own, and if you then "up the ante" and back your own position with documented sources, you've pretty effectively proven your point and made your opponent look like a hothead besides.

I would like to thank my anonymous benefactor for not doing that to me, because I made several mistakes. Then again, within the context of the discussion, I believe the A.C. was implicitly defending the position that the whole WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers; a shorthand for describing the essential ingredients of a modern GUI) shebang was invented at Xerox PARC, which would be even more wrong than I was.

My primary source of information is the book (please forgive me) Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything, by Steven Levy. Sure, it's about the Mac, but really, how can you have any kind of meaningful discussion of GUI based computing without mentioning the Mac?

Yes, I was wrong. It was not multiple windows that were invented in the 1940s, it was information surfing. Vannevar Bush, in his July 1945 Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think describes the sort of ad-hoc, stream-of-consciousness, associative method that characterizes the way we access information on the Web. Bush envisioned a work station with multiple screens, not multiple windows.

I was also wrong about the mouse being invented in the 1950s. Douglas Englebart didn't invent the mouse until the mid 1960s, when he was at SRI. Here's an interesting Smithsonian Institution interview with Douglas Englebart.

Sometime after 1966, Alan Kay at the University of Utah (later to join PARC) designed a "personal" computer called Flex that featured high-resolution graphics, icons and multiple windows. However, Kay himself admits (in Insanely Great) its interface was "repellent to users." Kay went on to work on the Alto and Macintosh.

In his own words, Jeff Raskin developed an idea for a graphical, multi-font WYSIWYG computer interface based on a bitmapped display in the mid-1960s, which is described in his 1967 Penn State thesis, A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System. I couldn't find a link to the thesis itself, but it is referenced in the database of the Software Patent Institute Raskin started the Macintosh project at Apple.

Xerox PARC was founded in the year 1970. According to Levy, the Alto prototype was built at the end of 1972. Here's a nice A HREF="http://www.research.microsoft.com/users/blam pson/38-AltoSoftware/WebPage.html">artic le about the Alto.

Here is another interesting site with a number of links to articles on History of Computing

So, in the end, I was wrong about multiple windows, wrong about the mouse, right about WSIWYG, and right about all of these existing before the creation of PARC. I apologize for not checking my facts before posting.

Finally, to my "small-minded heckler", thank you.