Slashdot Mirror
Speak Up On Software Patents And WIPO Rules
Jim Madison writes: "Today, the Department of Commerce's United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced that it is soliciting public comment in a Federal Register notice on the databases it uses to find prior art relevant to its examination of software-implemented business method patents. We've discussed this topic ad naseum, so here's an opportunity to make sure that policy-makers understand our perspective. Maybe slashdot mgmt. could even forward the top rated comments to them directly!"
And an unnamed reader points out that tomorrow is the due date for comments on the Interim Report of the Second WIPO Internet Domain Name Process, which "has some crazy suggestions such as reserving domains using pharmaceutical names and bolstering the claims of commercial entities against 'cybersquatters.'"
There is a well established method for determining what is a truly novel and worthwhile contribution: peer review. The academic journals and conferences do it, and the basic principle is that the best people to evaluate a particular submission are those who actively do work in that area. It operates under the assumption that it is the professional responsibility of people to be willing to review and comment on the work of others. The right to do this could be guaranteed under law just like jury duty is protected from employers retaliation.
:-) By having people who are truly skilled in the specific art evaluating the patent applications, it would be much less likely for truly obvious things to get blocked by trivial patents. The knowledge that the patent applications are going to be subjected to such strict scrutiny would probably be enough to discourage some of the most egregious attempts to patent obvious things. This would make the volume of applications much more manageable as well.
If we must have a patent system, then it seems necessary that the patent applications be peer reviewed by real practicioners and academics in their fields and not just by the underpaid patent clerks at the PTO. They're not all Albert Einstein!
Any additional costs imposed by this system could be recovered in the form of higher patent fees. At the current time, the US patent fees are a small fraction of the attorney fees that most of us have to pay to prepare the patent.
The law requires that a patent be granted for an invention unless USPTO can establish, typically based on prior art references, that the invention is not new or that it is obvious when viewed in the context of what is already known in the technology. Additionally, the invention must have a concrete, tangible and useful result, and how to make and use the invention must be disclosed.
What if someone were to discover something they thought would be relative towards future improvements in technology, would they be denied a patent should they not be able to demonstrate its use?
Sorry to say but I see the office is doing one of a few things, 1) trying to avoid doing the proper jobs they're already paid to do 2) looking to pass blame should they be criticized for something in the future. Could be they just don't understand technology enough, and with all the crappy patent suits around their looking around for an answer which could be a bad reason, for reasons following.
Suppose programmers at IBM set out to comment on things which would typically affect the scale to IBM's interest. Wouldn't be fair now would it. Or if it were Microsoft or someone other company, contractor. Personally I think what they should do is have an educational institution of Professors, and students come up with a resolution to their problems, on both the technological side of things, as well as a legal aspect of it to avoid future scrutiny.
Leaving it up to the community in my eyes is a bad idea, since humans being humans will generally tend to have biased views whether they realize it or not.
Want Root?
It's clear that any government office in the US is managed by older men and women, most of which probably don't know much more than how to turn a computer on and get email. These are the people making decisions that affect us technologically savvy people and our jobs. Lobbyists tell them what they want to know, and as we've seen with RIAA and other large groups, they get their way even if they're not telling the truth.
What the government needs, including USPTO, is people that specifically deal with technology - people that understand this stuff like many of the fine people that use Slashdot everyday. We can't know everything about all the patents for technology, but we might have better insight as where to start.
I've only used the USPTO databases (rather, the public accessible databases) a few times - just for curiosity's sake - but I know that the information dealing with technology can be gotten. You just have to know what you're looking for. Joe Smith who uses AOL might not understand the technology behind the patent pending technology, so he's not going to know where to start. Now, CowboyNeal sees the technology and investigates it further (or perhaps already knows about it because of the fast-paced Slashdot News service) and know exactly (or close to) where to start looking.
This isn't a be-all, end-all solution, but it's something the government definitely needs to think about as a whole. We need people that understand technology making policy on technology lest we patent and put a stop to everything technological so that no one can innovate ideas based on current innovations or use technology to better this world (like multilingual DNS).
Maybe I'm just being the eternal optimist but I have to think that since the office is composed of, essentially, a bunch of average human being they are probably prone to the same kind of thinking that other human beings are prone to. If you sat in a room all day and rubber stamped patent applications you might not care all that much about whether you understood them or not. If you never received any feedback it would only make matters worse.
Left unchanged that type of situation brings about that kind we are in right now, where big business can step in and influence things in the direction they want. In order to undo that problem I think the people who actually do care about patents, and who see the damage done from bad ones, need to get more involved. If commenting is the first step then I say get over there and comment. You might not stop today's One Click Patent but you might stop tomorrow's.
Thank you for reading this comment.
Software is nothing more than fancy math, really. And the USPTO established long ago that math could not be patented. The first "software" patent was issued on a chemical manufacturing process that included a software program on a computer to control the process.
Unfortunately, the validity of software patents was never successfully challenged, and here we sit with morons like Amazon patenting one-click shopping. And the USPTO thinks that if we can somehow find a better database to prove that someone else had one-click first, they'll somehow improve?
Here's a database suggestion for them: Google.