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IBM Calls for Patent Reform
daria42 writes "IBM has called for tighter regulation of patents and a review of intellectual property ownership issues in collaborative software development. The company is one of the largest patent-holders in the United States. IBM executive Jim Stallings said examining patents for prior art should not only be the job of the patent office but that the wider community should be involved. Stallings also called on the industry to stop what he calls "bad behaviour" by companies who either seek patents for unoriginal work or collect and hoard patents."
It seems IBM's argument is that there are way too many patent applications being submitted to accurate evaluate them. Their solution:
IBM's antidote to the problem is to increase the scope of the investigation into 'prior art' associated with software patents. Stallings believes that sort of undertaking is something the academic community, volunteers and others are willing to help in.
Something obviously must be done to fix this problem but I'm not sure how the proposed system would work. As soon as "volunteers" have the ability to submit prior art challenges to patent applications, you'll likely see as many or more prior art challenges than patent applications. Who's going to evaluate the prior art challenges AND the patent applications then?
I'm a big tall mofo.
By making their patent on patent reform available for a small fee.
Hello, kettle. This is pot. You're black.
Dear Patent Lawyers,
Could you please justify by reply in moderate detail the supposed net benefit to society (rather than just to corporations) of software patents explaining why you think that extending the patent system to cover software is not harmful both to society and to freedom of expression given the case of an open-source software developer who, as a result of
is threatened with a patent lawsuit by a corporation demanding he/she removes the allegedly infringing software from the project's website, leaving the impoverished developer with no real choice but to comply with the demand and close the project?
One recent unresolved case, which is not unique, is that of the German mathematician and open-source software developer Helmut Dersch who had no financial choice but to remove his software from his project website. He had no money to pay for a patent application at the time of his own inventions, which pre-date the patent application of the IPX company , to to pay for a lawyer to challenge the company which threatened him with the prospect of a lawsuit.
Here is a summary of the case history.
I hope you will take the time to reply at moderate length for the sake of explaining to the open-source developer community why software patents are not a threat to completely unfunded open-source projects.
Thank you for reading this. If you are a patent lawyer, please mention that fact in your reply here.
Last posted here without a reply from any patent lawyers reading slashdot.
Please copy and re-post this message in all available forums until at least one patent lawyer has the courtesy to write a thorough reply.
Yes, IBM is trying really hard to be 'the nice guy' this last decade - this is a good thing.
But let's not forget that they also make billions (this is also a good thing). I think they realise the whole is going to end up in a mexican standoff - a lot of companies having stupid patents for stupid components of an application, and all it will take is one rogue company / individual with a critical patent who doesnt want to play ball, to cause some serious problems.
We would probably all love to see silly software patents abolished or even limited for 12 months or something.
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
Yesterday's New York Times had a related article (do not pass Go, sell your soul). One of the points was that IBM is sharing some of its patents so that others may build on them. Collaboration is more economically efficient (ie. profitable) in the global business-space.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
The very fact that IBM does indeed have a ton of patents, yet still wants tighter reviews over patenting procedures and improvements over the current guidelines means that they are even looking towards their own current patents.
It would be one thing for a company without patents to scream "The patent system is screwed!!! fix it!", leaving everyone calling that company a whiner.
But it another thing when a company with tons of patents says the exact same thing, even if the reformation change can hurt them. This means they are willing to take losses of their own for the benefit of the patent process.
Here's the problem. In order to patent something, it must be either something completely new, or a novel enhancement on something that already exists. The problem that exists, is that companies can simply take something that already exists, and add "On The Internet" to it. We as tech savvy people see this as a big copp out, and think these patents of bogus. Well, it becomes really hard to figure out when doing X on the internet really is novel, while doing Y on the internet is not. If taking one thing and adding "On The Internet" is a valid patent, then taking any thing and adding "On The Internet" should work.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Whereas the patent portfolio for Amazon is filled with things like "one click shopping" or whatever, IBM has always done *EXTENSIVE* research. They make chips, and have a gambit of patents associated with them. They even work on things like teleportation for crying out loud. Yes - like "beam me up, Scott" type teleportation.
No - IBM isn't Dell, a company that has never come up with anything new and does little else other than figure out the cheapest way to produce something. IBM isn't even a Microsoft, a company based entirely off taking someone else's ideas and implimenting them in proprietary ways (a compnay whose only real contribution is getting platforms and applications to work together well). Instead, IBM is very very heavily research-based. IMO, it's perfectly valid for IBM to have a vast # of patents, considering how much research it does. Dollar per research dollar, I'm willing to be it doesn't have all that many more per year than anyone else - they just put more dollars into it.
With that in mind - suggesting they're the pot calling the kettle black is a bit of a stretch. They've got a lot of patent experience sure (there's a nice soft word for it, eh?) but back to that dollar per research dollar thing...
If Cornell and Harvard got together and tried to get higher education to be more affordable for all Americans, would their intent be questioned simply because they're a couple of the more expensive schools? I pay $30k a year for my wife to go to vet school at Cornell. It's very painful. Cornell knows it, and is sympathetic to a degree...I know they would have loved to have seen Clinton's promised education costs reforms.
Same bit. IBM does a lot of research, gets a lot of patents. Simply because they have a lot of patents doesn't invalidate their opinion that there is abuse of the patent system.
If you've read patents, you know how vague and dry they usually are. If you think you're going to get volunteers and the academic community to do prior art research for you in a structured way, on all patent applications, you're nuts.
I can understand IBM's interest in patent reform. Maintaining a patent portfolio like theirs is not cheap, and they're a giant litigation target. Given their R&D, they're likely going to remain the 800-pound gorilla in patents no matter what the rules are.
A much better solution would be to place more of the burden of the patent process on the applicant, in a way that's easily verifiable. If an applicant was forced to more thoroughly justify why their work is exceptional, with a bias towards granting a patent as specific to the reference implementation as possible, we'd see fewer applications, which would give more review time to the examiners, and less patent collision, where multiple vague patents cover the same thing.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
"Could you please justify by reply in moderate detail the supposed net benefit to society..."
That's far enough - there's no need to even mention open source or free software projects: the onus is on those who are proponents of software patents (or any other kind of patent) to show that they promote progress in the sciences and useful arts. It must be demonstrated by them that the overall effect is beneficial in each area of technology and in each industry to which the patent system is applied.
Patent attorneys and others will always try to hoodwink us into believing all kinds of nonsense about the patent system. They use words and expressions like "protection", "intellectual property" and "theft" to mislead people into believing that a patent represents some kind of tangible entity over which people have natural rights. But we should never forget what a patent really is: a government granted 20 year monopoly right to exclude everyone else other than the patentee from freely using some idea, whether they came up with it independently or not. Unlike a copyright, it is a kind of officially sanctioned and enforced removal of rights from everyone else and in the case of software patents it is a serious infringement of the tangible property rights of millions of computer owners.
Extraordinary interventions in the free market, that even entail curtailment of natural rights and liberties, demand extraordinary justification.
I'd add that patents on ideas that are highly likely to be reinvented by other teams are also highly likely to be unoriginal - with or without prior art.
Patents on such ideas do not just curtail the economically-sound interchange of such ideas in the future, they actively remove people's rights to the fruit of their own labour, the copyrighted works they produce independently.
A broad software patent can, at a stroke, turn a life's work into something with no value. Unlike patents on physical inventions, this is not unlikely... in fact it's going to become more and more common to hear about such stories.
The patent offices are, basically, in a corrupt symbiosis with patent lawyers, stealing ideas from the "commons", and turning the real inventors into peons. It's a classic abuse of the "tragedy of the commons", in which corrupt officials argue that the commons need "their protection" when in fact there is a well-functioning economy already in place.
It's much expropriating property - someone's house, or a park, or public lands - for business reasons.
Parkinson's law: officialdom will always expand to consume its budget. In the case of the patent offices, the budget is limitless.
The patent offices, and the patent lawyers, are IMHO the real villains of the affair. I am quite surprised that no-one has yet launched a lawsuit against the USPTO for larceny.
I don't think you will get many useful replies from the patent lawyers who read this.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
...therefore I will post this anonymously.
It is harder to get a patent through the IBM internal review process (which you have to complete before Legal will consider filing it) than it is to get the USPTO to take it. A team of other IBMers (usually inventors themselves) ensure that it is innovative and possible. The revenue possibilities are also considered.
I've put 11 ideas through the process, all of which I am reasonably sure would have been granted by the USPTO, and only 1 of those has been applied for. Three were thought worth protecting but not patenting -- they are published on the ip.com prior art database to prevent anyone else patenting them.
If all corporations handled patents as responsibly as IBM we wouldn't have a problem.