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Community Patent Review Project Announced
PatPending writes "American companies General Electric, IBM, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard have joined with the New York Law School and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to inaugarate a new system of peer review for software patents.
The four companies, plus Red Hat, the world's biggest listed open source software business, are the lead sponsors behind the Community Patent Review project.
The one-year pilot program will begin in early 2007 and focus on published but not-yet-granted patent applications relating to computer software. Scientists and engineers will be able to submit prior art to patent examiners at the USPTO using an online system. All Community Patent review project documents will be available on the internet for public comment.
'High-quality patents increase certainty around intellectual property rights, reducing contention and freeing resources to focus on innovation,' said David Kappos, vice president of IP law at IBM."
I hold the patent for online peer-review of patents. I beat Jeff Bezos to it by maybe a day or two.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
they had a system like this.
While this may appear to be a good thing, what it amounts to is these companies further wasting resources in an effort to stop the resources that are already being wasted due to a flawed patent system.
Think of all the money these firms put towards lawyers fees, patent filing fees, and so forth. These actions produce very little actual value, even if they do perhaps limit legal issues in the future. Had that money gone to R&D or to an engineering department instead of to lawyers, there is likely something of tangible value that would have been produced.
The only truly effective solution is to get rid of software and software-related patents. If a software firm wants to keep their algorithms a secret, it's easy enough to do by paying current and former employees to remain silent, and using a compiled language to help prevent decompilation of software that uses said algorithms.
What's to stop the company/person with the prior art filing their own patent when the copycat is denied?
Don't the largest current patent holders have the most to gain from this?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
American companies General Electric, IBM, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard have joined... The four companies, plus Red Hat, the world's biggest listed open source software business, are the lead sponsors...
... Doesn't Sun with Solaris and Java qualify as "the world's biggest listed open source software business"... Even Novell with SuSE could qualify for that title.
Did I miss something or could this have been written as:
American companies General Electric, IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Red Hat have joined with the New York Law School and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to inaugarate a new system of peer review for software patents.
As for for the comment: " Red Hat, the world's biggest listed open source software business,"
Infiltrated dot Net
I'm actually kind of surprised no one's started a wiki like this... :)
I've got a great new piece of software that hasn't been patented yet, I think I'll hand it over to Microsoft for review...
"We got ours, lets make damn sure nobody else gets any"
How nice.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Of course if you get tire of waiting (they've been announcing this for a while now) you can go look at published patent applications here.
Can't you be held liable to a greater degree if you knowingly infringe on someone's patent rather then unknowingly infringe? Given how many non-prior art but still completely obvious software patents are granted all the time that shouldn't be upheld by the courts, you run a much greater risk of handing over a lot more money if you lose, right? If so, I can't imagine too many people would be willing to take that increased risk. It's much safer to simply not read about the patents and then attack the ridiculous patent, and hand over less money if you lose.
So if most people do decide it's safer to avoid reading about the software patents, isn't that going to make this new system difficult to actually work?
The only good software patent is a dead software patent.
All software patents are bad patents. Full fucking stop.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Of course it's being done to prevent wasted resources. That's what business is all about: putting the resources you do have to the most efficient use, such that you can obtain the greatest return possible from those resources.
Suppose IBM spends a $1000000 on legal fees at some point, perhaps to fight a legal battle they want nothing to do with. That in turn leads to $1000000 that could have been used elsewhere, perhaps getting them a far greater return. Say they put that $1000000 towards the development of the Linux kernel, rather than in the pockets of a few lawyers. The entire Linux community, consisting of millions of people, could benefit from IBM's contribution, rather than just a small number of lawyers.
Now Microsoft can use its software and EULAs to control what patents are issued.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Intellectual property is the creation of naive egotists. It is those that do not understand the term "standing on the shoulders of giants" that will blindly follow the path of monopoly and corruption.
a fantastic way for billion dollar multi-national software corporations to prevent startup companies from gaining any traction in the marketplace by preventing them from protecting their IP.
To fairly grant a patent, the patent office must be able to understand a) what has already been done b) what is just plain obvious.
To achieve either you have to be skilled in the art of the subject at hand and that is just not something one could reasonably expect of a patent examiner who must be a generalist. A community skilled in the art must get involved and I really think this a good thing and could turn the patent system around. No matter how evil you think patents are, they are not going away anytime soon. The best we can do is to better the current situation by supporting efforts such as this.
Take Microsoft. They've spend a ton of money this year alone settling patent infringement claims against small people/organizations. Now they no longer have to. And Microsoft isn't the only one.
Back in the 70's, the rumors (I heard from guys at IBM no less) were that IBM had Patent Examiners on the take to make certain no patent popped up that might be a threat to them. Now they've created a monster that is much cheaper to operate.
In short, this approach gives the appearance that the big companies can collaborate to approve each others patents, while completely shutting out any little guy who might be a threat. Companies are obligated to do things in their own best interest. And they appear to be taking the Patent Office for a ride.
I'm sorry, but this is yet another incredible screw-up by the Patent Office, once more displaying that they just haven't a clue about what they are doing. This effort raises so many questions about conflict of interest that it just doesn't have any credibility whatsoever.
There really is no way out of the Software Patent mess other than to abolish them. Until then, innovation will continue to suffer.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
...sarcasm off. Of course you're right.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
A lot of this is because software is one of the few products that can be effectively produced with reasonably low capital input and has essentially no cost of manufacture once it's been created. Letting everyone get their hands on an idea will be more effective for that sort of product.
So, I submit that a sensibly defined patent system would not have software and business methods within its scope.
Bruce Perens.
Do patents help innovation? I don't necessarily think so but we have an experiment in the works. Europe has no software patents while in the US all they are doing is trying to make patents "better"(they just want to spend less on litigation and refiling using free labor...bastards). Let's see how this works out:
1. Big Patent Holder Patents X in USA
2. European Company uses X in its software
3. Profit!
Europe is looking like a good place to be making software...
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
.. When they hurt innovation like they are doing in the United States in regards to software then they are obsolete and violate the purpose for which they were created.
Patents aren't nessicarially bad. Software patents are proven to be bad however. (Unless your IBM or Microsoft, of course.)
(chirp, chirp, chirp)
While what you say is true, I would not phrase it quite so contentiously if you want others to understand and accept your point.
A less argumentative observation is that no man is an island, and inventions are all founded upon a collosal international sea of ideas. Without his education and everything that went before him, the inventor would have invented nothing.
A researcher may indeed be doing something original, but he's the 0.001% tip of a 99.999% mountain of effort, and laying personal claim to his contribution as his own "intellectual property" is simply dishonest. Standing alone, the new snippet of insight is entirely worthless.
But such observations are not criticisms of peer patent review, since that operates to *reduce* the number of patents, and so can only be good.
Have money, will waste other people's time (the happy patent applicant)
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
It just occurred to me though that if you _do_ remove software patents then for _non_ trivial pieces of software engineering, pieces that may take years to write, you will end up with no protection. One of your own engineers could go, re-write your software in a different language, or even write it in parallel, and sell it themselves.
Now the market forces are different for software. But just because the cost to replicate a copy is $0.00 does not mean that you aren't due protection. Software's "manufacturing process" just so happens to be R&D time. A _good_ patent system would recognize that.
However, patents on _small_ or _trivial_ pieces of software is a different matter.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
You ask for 1000 and you get 1.
If you ask for 1 you'll get -1.
It's the same thing RIAA does. They say: "we'll take away ALL your freedoms" and we negotiate and settle down to "OK, take our freedom to copy OUR DATA. Phew".
Join oink.
http://oinkoink.pbwiki.com/
The system is intended to provide the public a chance to examine patent applications and provide prior art that they feel is applicable.
This is the system that would address the common complaint on slashdot and elsewhere that patents are granted that covers something that you know has been done before. You will now have an opportunity to provide that prior art to the system where you can say exactly how you think it precludes the pending application. Yourself and others will get to rate all the prior art submitted and the top ten or so results are sent to the examiner when he or she begins prosecution of the application.
That is it. It doesn't matter how many big companies try to snowball a smaller applicant, they still only get at best 10 results that the examiner can look at right away and see aren't applicable. The new peer review system does not in anyway modify the current examination process. It merely provides another prescreening process to help the USPTO and the applicant craft patents that do not infringe and are new and novel.
The only people SW patents and patents in general protect are the trolls and the uber corporations with thousands of patents already in a portfolio to be swapped with other portfolios.
The major expenditures for software, both up front and ongoing is not R&D, but marketing and support. A company with such a non-trivial peoce of software is much better off to keep its development under wraps and trade secret. The advantage lies in being first to market, capturing and keeping mindshare and not an artifical constraint on competition.
Your rogue employee is kept in check by NDA and yellow-dog contracts enforced by the legal department of a company large enough to undertake such a non-trivial project.
If you cant kick it, you cant patent it.
If you don't have something generating revenue using it in 2 years, you loose it.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
You can only patent an algorithm or a process.
In general, these translate to small parts of an overall body of software. So what protection is there for large works? Copyright. If you put in a lot of time to write something, other folks aren't allowed to copy your work without permission. They have to put in time just like you did.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Then along come the patent trolls. These people don't have any viable products to defend, so they aren't interested in swapping patents. They just want cash. Its an unforseen consequence of the new rules that the big players don't like.
But now they have a hand in screening new patents. Consider:
Note that the huge pile of dubious patents already granted aren't up for review. Adding another layer of review will probably slow down matters for big companies as well, but everything already granted is getting a free ride.===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Patent Examiner's aren't generalists, they look at a specific subset of technologies.
I had a chance a few weeks ago to sit in on a meeting of the IPLA on this exact subject.
The peer review project will be of use to examiner's for prior art, but as I undestand from the implementation, the comments may or may not be visible to the Examiners on the IDS they recieve. Further, how will the legal education of the participants be ensured? For example, who will educate them on the differences between comprising/consisting/consisting essentially of etc and what the legal definition of obviousness really is?
Will references be supplied to reject the claims, or the specification?
Will applicants have a chance to ammend their claims prior to examination after recieving the prior art references?
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
There are already enough laws to protect large software companies. The first is copyright. I could not take the source code of Oracle or MS and sell it. If I did, I would owe all my profits to Oracle, MS or whatever company I took the copyrighted code from. As for your other suggestion of just *one* guy recreating the code in parallel, well that is just not reality. First, I am am a programmer with a decade of experience. Any good sized project requires more than one person. No one single programmer understands the whole code base enough to do what you suggest. Second, I have never worked for a company where I didn't sign an NDA. So if I did do what you suggested, I would be in court and lose a very fast court case and all the profits I made would be owed to the company I took the code base from.
Point being... there are already plenty of laws and contracts in place to protect just about any legitament situation that could arise with regards to the "IP" of source code.
The *only* things software patents allow are: patent trolls (people/companies that do not actually create, they just patent a stinking idea with no real work and either prevent or charge others to have the same idea) and companies with enough cash to buy up literally thousands of bogus patents to lock up the software development industry from any competition.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.