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US to Give Web Patents More Scrutiny

Posted by Hemos on from the reviewing-the-office dept.

bitFliper was one of the people who sent us the public version of the Wall Street Journal article that talks about the USPTO proposed overhaul of the way it examines patents for many computer practices. Woo-hoo! Here's to sanity!

3 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. It would be nice... by randombit · · Score: 4

    Under fire for his company's suit, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos has proposed a sharp reduction in the duration of Internet-related patent rights, which, like all other patents, are good for 20 years from application.

    I'd like to see patents for anything involving computers to last 3 or 5 years from the time the patent is granted. It's just totally unreasonable that someone can patent something, and basically prevent it's use forever, since by the time 20 years rolls around, the technique is almost certainly completely obsolete (replaced by new patented technology, etc etc). Not to mention all the bogus patents (sliding year windows for Y2K fixes, one click shopping, etc) that have been floating around lately. Well, here's hopin...

  2. some improvement, but doesn't address the problem by jetson123 · · Score: 5
    Improving the quality of USPTO patent examinations would represent some improvement--a number of the patents that have been granted simply have lots of prior art.

    But I doubt this is going to address the fundamental problem: the USPTO has greatly expanded the fields in which patents are granted, to include software, business methods, and scientific data. This happened without direction by the legislature, and it represents a change from previous practices. This is particularly unfair because a number of the inventions that the USPTO granted patents on in the 1990s were already developed by practitioners in the 1970s and 1980s, but they couldn't apply for them then because the USPTO wouldn't have granted them then.

    If you permit patents in these newly created areas of patentability, no amount of additional examination is going to address the underlying problem.

    I also have my doubts that even "senior" examiners are going to be significantly more effective in weeding out patents with ample prior art, in part because the definition of "prior art" that the USPTO and courts apply seems to be very narrow. For example, patents like the shopping cart, e-commerce, on-screen television program grids, etc., have already been used for many years on the Minitel system, but I suspect that despite their technical similarity, courts and examiners would consider Minitel and the Web to be different uses.

    Altogether, I don't see this announcement as much progress. I think it's pretty clear that Dickinson is doing it because he can use this as an argument to get more money and resources for his agency, a common goal of federal fiefdoms, not because anybody convinced him that something is wrong. If he gets the resources, he has more power and gets good PR out of it ("see, we are responsive"), and if he doesn't, he has an excuse for granting more bad patents ("if you had only given us more people").

    Not to be misunderstood, given the current system, no matter what Dickinson's motivations are, more careful examinations are a slight improvement. But this doesn't address the underlying problems and issues at all.

  3. This is the right response by ludes · · Score: 5

    I think that this is absolutely the right first step to handling the internet/software patent issues. A lot of casual talk here on slashdot (and elsewhere) has focused on making fundamental changes to the law, when in fact, the law as it was written by Congress has never really been in effect in the real world because the PTO has been doing such a lousy job of examining software patents. A large number of the complaints about individual patents that have been raised on slashdot have centered on the "that technique is old" or "that's obvious, any skilled programmer could do that" type of complaints. If the PTO does correctly implement this more rigorous examination process most of these kind of complaints will go away.

    There will still be the larger policy debate on software/internet patents in general, but I think that that debate will be much more focused without the distraction of the really bad patents. This is important because the truly lousy patents aren't so much the fault of bad law but more the failure of the PTO to do its job. And in the spirit of using the right tool to do the right job, changes at the PTO are probably a better tool than changing the law, at least at this point.

    Additionally, changes at the PTO will not require the incredibly long process of new legislation to change the law, etc. We may see results sooner this way.

    It will be interesting to see if the PTO can actually pull this off given the usual government bureaucracy problems.