IBM Adopts Open Patent Policy

Andy Updegrove writes to mention a New York Times article about IBM's bold new move to reform patent practices. The nation's largest patent holder will adopt several new policies intended to clear up the veil of secrecy and wall of lawsuits that plague the patent process. From the article: "The policy, being announced today, includes standards like clearly identifying the corporate ownership of patents, to avoid filings that cloak authorship under the name of an individual or dummy company. It also asserts that so-called business methods alone -- broad descriptions of ideas, without technical specifics -- should not be patentable. The move by I.B.M. does carry business risks. Patents typically take three or four years after filing to be approved by the patent office. Companies often try to keep patent applications private for as long as possible, to try to hide their technical intentions from rivals."

Comments

Value proposition

[tomstdenis]

Patents on many things are kinda moot. Put a patent on your CPU design, but only a handful of companies on earth can actually make an ASIC...If foundry's are a dime-a-dozen what's your value? [hint: they're not, which is why being able to make reliable chips is a value proposition worth holding onto]

If companies just focused on things they can offer, at qualities no one else can then they'd make money. It's when they get this entitled sense of "I have a right to be making gobs of money regardless of what I do" that we get into this patent mess.

Tom

Re:Value proposition

[Brickwall]

It's when they get this entitled sense of "I have a right to be making gobs of money regardless of what I do" that we get into this patent mess.

But it's not a case of "regardless of what I do" - it's a case of "I did something unique, and I want to be rewarded for it". That's why the US Constitution specifically provides for patents of limited duration. If they truly developed something new, they are entitled to a reward (as opposed to the ridiculous "business model" patents that caused RIM and the Blackberry so much trouble). If IBM is truly leading the way to junk the business model patent, they are doing all of us a service.

Re:Value proposition

[Chacham]

Being obstructed by a THOUGHT is ludicrous. Getting patents on things that all of your competitors could easily do as well means your business is not well founded.

If your competitors can't do it, there is no reason for a patent.

The patent is made to protect the filer. The protection is that it protects his time and money.

If i create the better mouse trap, and the world starts beating a path to my door, i need to invest money to start making more. The problem is, by the time i put the money and effort in to getting my factory going, an old-style mouse trap company will use one production line to make this new one. End result, i'm out all that money because they can outsell me due to preexisting infrastructure. However, if i get a patent, i can put my money and effort into it, knowing that i am protected for a period of time.

Re:Value proposition

[morgan_greywolf]

I agree there is a problem if your employees steal your companies technology and take it elsewhere. That's where employee contracts come in handy. I think instead of a Patent act we should have a secrecy act. That is, you can be sued if you take advantage of someone elses secrets by poaching employees or espionage [but not via co-invention].

We do. It's called trade secret law, and it's a very old form of law rooted in British common law. Virtually every tech company out there makes use of trade secret law on a day-to-day basis. Of course, the problem with trade secret law is this: what if I can figure out how to make a 65nm circuit by examining it with electron microscope? Well, then guess what? The trade secret isn't secret anymore and it loses its protected status. That's where patents come in.

I'm not in favor of abolishing patents -- I think patents are a good thing when used correctly. It's the patent abuse that ruins the whole system. I don't think we should throw out the baby with the bath water. What we need to do is reform the patent system, and IBM has taken a good first step in leading the way. No more business process patents, no more vagueness, and for godsakes, if you haven't implemented your invention yet, you don't deserve a patent. And the USPTO needs to stop granting patents for things that are blatantly obvious to anyone skilled in the art.

Re:Value proposition

[ceoyoyo]

The problem with trade secret law is that your technology is a secret. The point of patents isn't really to protect inventors -- in many cases they can do that themselves with trade secrets. The point is to encourage further innovation by making knowledge public. Nobody would make their mouse trap building process public because everyone would steal it... so they are awarded a patent in exchange for making their invention and specifics on how to duplicate it, public. The patent guarantees them a monopoly on it for a set period of time in exchange for sharing that knowledge.

Re:Seriously?

[ZachPruckowski]

If the only people who are saying that something is screwed up are the people hurt by it, that's one thing. But it lends a lot more legitimacy to a campaign to have not only victims but beneficiaries calling foul. Not to mention that IBM has a lot more campaigning weight and power than the EFF, GNU Foundation, and everyone else combined.

It's not just IBM

[Phantom of the Opera]

I.B.M. is one of several companies that have agreed to submit some patent applications for open peer review as part of the project, beginning early next year. The others include Microsoft, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Intel and Red Hat.

The above-mentioned corporations do all skilled legal staff but patent litigation is not their business. IBM and GE in particular have expertise that allow them to follow through on their patents. Any "copy-cats" would have difficulty producing products from many of the more esoteric, high tech or highly process oriented technologies these companies have to offer.

If patent finding publishing becomes widespread, it will give companies the legal footing to allow them to concentrate on creating technology rather than split hairs over buzzwords. We see an aligning of real innovators against those who simply gamble that some court will award them money like mana from heaven.

IBM is trapped by its own invention

[pieterh]

IBM's patent lawyers invented software patents in the first place. You can see what they were thinking... "we patent all our hardware, now more and more of those designs are implemented in software, so we should patent software too".

The trouble is, there is no dividing line between a patent for microcode, and a patent for swinging a pizza. The moment you allow the definition of a software model to be patented, you open the gates to patents on every idea. It just takes time - 10 years - before the patent industry assiduously hacks every single definition, but it happens.

IBM is now very unhappy with the patent situation. They have invested hundreds of millions (billions, probably) in their patent portfolio but it mostly covers older technology where there is less and less licensing opportunity. Meanwhile the patent business is creating record turnover, which deflates their patent portfolio.

Yes, IBM is against business process patents. Big deal. Any business process can be reworked as a software patent. Any border that tries to separate the 'good' software patents from the 'bad' ones can be hacked until it's gone.

The only reason large firms like IBM, SAP, and Microsoft still support the software patent model is because their patent policy is dictated by patent attornies. If the CFO or CTO was in charge, it'd be different.

As for the suggestion that patents were "closed" before... bizarre. The whole justification for granting a patent monopoly is to reward the inventor for publishing his work.

Re:Not so fast

[TheRaven64]

E.g., to give the old (and now expired) whine about the LZW patent, how about you invent a compression algorithm from scratch, if you think compression is trivial.

I was not familiar with exactly how LZW worked, but I am familiar with basic information theory. To test this, I sat down for a minute (actually, I was already sitting) and considered how I would go about creating a universal stream compressor. I then checked the Wikipedia page for LZW. Reading around that, it seems that LZW is very similar to the algorithm that I came up with in a short time (different symbol lengths, slightly different encoding, but comparable. I'd have to implement them both to see which was better, but a quick information theoretical examination shows that they should be relatively close). Of course, these days there there are much better algorithms available; I would claim to be able to come up with something better than, or even equivalent to, the algorithms used in bzip2, for example.

About the only thing LZW had going for it was its ubiquity; the fact that the UNIX compress tool and the GIF file format used it. Designing an algorithm better than LZW is not hard, as is shown by the plethora of better compression algorithms that exist. I would expect that anyone with a degree in Computer Science or Mathematics could come up with one at least close to LZW (and if they couldn't, I'd like to know what institution awarded their degree). The difficult thing is generating a better decompression algorithm that still lets you view your GIF images.

Another good example of a software patent is the Marching Cubes algorithm. This is the standard way of generating an isosurface of a volume. Or, rather, it would be. Since it was patented, the community responded by developing the Marching Tetrahedra algorithm. Anyone with any experience working with volume graphics will tell you that both are trivial to derive from first principles (i.e. obvious), being little more than extensions into three dimensions of flood-fill algorithms (a slight oversimplification, but not a huge one). Similarly, LZW is obvious to anyone with a background in information theory.

By the way, both of these patents were filed within a year of each other. This means that both of them are expiring about now. The only positive benefit that either has had is to force implementers to come up with better algorithms (almost the opposite of the stated aim of patents) as a work-around. This is fine (although smacks of re-inventing the wheel in a lot of cases) for the most part, but in cases like LZW it is a huge impediment to the industry since it requires the abandonment and replacement of an established file format.