US Software Patents Hit Record High

Aditi Tuteja writes "US Patent and Trademark Office made a new record for the number of software patents awarded in a single year. The agency has issued 893 new patents yesterday. Pushing the total to 30,232 in this year. If this is the trend, more than 40,000 software patents will be issued this year, according to the Public Patent Foundation. The previous record was set in 2004. Several major technology vendors have pledged not to enforce their patents against open source projects. IBM for instance essentially donated 500 patents to open source projects last year. Earlier this year, the US Supreme Court overthrew a prior judgement that required a judge to issue an automatic injunction if he found that a patent was being infringed."

Comments

Re:Thank God

[Ruie]

If we didn't have all this intellectual property everywhere, I feel very certain that we as a society would never write a line of code again.

Indeed.

In fact it is the second biggest thing after paper money: paper thought.

"Pledges" are worthless

[kcbrown]

Several major technology vendors have pledged not to enforce their patents against open source projects.

Such pledges aren't worth squat. While they may wind up in the record and thus could be used by open source projects as a defense in court, the bottom line is that one would still have to go to court to present that evidence. Against a well-financed corporation, that's likely to mean little, especially since some judges have even gone so far as to disregard prior art in order to uphold a patent claim.

The bottom line is that the court of law is not a rational venue, but instead seems to be a place to roll the dice, where the odds are stacked heavily in favor of whoever has the most cash.

That means that open source projects are going to be very vulnerable to patent lawsuits, even in the face of a "pledge" by the patentholders that they won't sue.

dupes?

[tomstdenis]

I'm waiting for the case of N peeps with vaguely overlapping patents [N > 2] and then they can have fights about it. I'd pay to watch that... wait...

I don't know why people are all proud about their patents. Places like IBMs hand out awards and framed pictures of [first page] the patent to inventors. Most of the time it's like "method and apparatus of doing something obvious, on the Internet." When patents are so easy to come by the value of them should be nil, or at least you'd like to think that...

Tom

Re:Ever filed a patent application?

[WebMink]

So, it's up to the courts to sort out the question of prior art. The common complaint here on slashdot (and in my own heart) is that the USPTO should check prior art... but now that I think about it, that seems inefficient. It's inefficient because most patents will never come to dispute, and hence are irrelevant. Why spend a gabillion dollars bringing in the necessary expertise, until you know that it actually matters (i.e. is actually challenged)?

Seems to me that the main problem here is that there's no meaningful penalty for ignoring prior art. One idea that seems easy but I've never seen pursued is for the law to be changed to treat a failure to cite prior art as perjury. Then, should a successful prior art case be prosecuted against a patent, the applicant would be subject to fines or even imprisonment. This simple change would rebalance the system and result in far fewer lame patents with obvious prior art.