Community Patent Review Project Announced

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Thursday November 2, 2006 @02:39PM from the coming-together dept.

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."

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This Makes Sense to Me by magixman · 2006-11-02 17:28 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.