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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."
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.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
How many of these are based on methods that are centuries old, like Projective Gauss-Siegel? And how many are just plain obvious?
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
How about patenting laws and social program methods? Then, if a party needs a particular law, they can license it. Imagine, campaigns of the future will be "Democrats to license healthcare law from LawPatentFolksInc Inc." This can also help prevent the passing of asinine laws. Think about it .. just before speeding, one can patent "method of reducing roadway speeding by fining arbitrarily large amount of money".
There's gold in 'dem there holes.
Pop the champagne and unleash the balloons!! We finally made it past 40,000! Congrats to all those patent workers working overtime, scouring through all that prior art to make sure that it was a solid 40,000 patents, congrats to the management for finally making a system to promote real progress, and finally, a huge congrats to the inventors! You guys really did all the hard work, discovering 40,000 things that no one would have ever thought of if not for your hard toiling work! Now it's time to reap those benefits as you take your inventions and begin building factories to build or use those inventions of yours! We wish you could give you longer than 23 years, but with the market as it is now, everyone's going to want a piece of the action eventually, and it's only fair that we give them a chance.
Here's to another year of unprecedented technological improvement!!! Wow, 40,000... Who would have ever thought the human race was capable of such wondrous achievements?
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
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.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
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
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
If I told you that such system for spot checking could not be feasibly created, would you still be pro patent?
In other words, does the pragmatic usability of idea affect your opinion about it? Or do you like some things, no matter how well they turn out in real life? (In other words, are you an idealist?) It's a real question. I'm not trying to imply anything.
Are you pro patent, then, in hopes of such system coming online soon? If there is no obvious reason to hope for such a system becoming available soon, then why are you pro patent?
Not only will every thing then be up for grabs, but it will all be neatly documented at the USPTO!
Wake me up in 20 years.
A related question - if someone suspects you of infinging their software patent, but you claim closed source, trade secret status, how can they prove you infringed, if you don't allow them to reverse engineer your software, under penalty of the DMCA?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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.