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IBM Breaks Patent Record, Wants Reform
An anonymous reader writes "IBM set the record for most patents granted in a year for 2006. At the same time, IBM points out that small companies earn more patents per capita than larger enterprises and pushes for reform to address shortcomings in the process of patenting business methods:
'The prevalence of patent applications that are of low quality or poorly written have led to backlogs of historic proportions, and the granting of patents protecting ideas that are not new, are overly broad, or obvious.' And the company has been committing itself to a new patent policy: 'Key tenets of the policy are that patent quality is the responsibility of the applicant; that patent applications should be open to public examination and that patent ownership should be transparent; and that business methods without technical content should not be patentable.'"
How about changes to make it easier or even possible to revoke bad patents?
From my very limited understanding of the situation, it seems like there is serious problem with the patent system because small companies patent everything to protect themselves from larger companies, larger companies patent everything to protect themselves from patent trolls, and patent trolls use the massive overworked system to get patents filed which will never be found by small or large coporations in order to sue for profit.
The patent system needs to be updated to reflect the world we live in now, not the world hundreds of years ago. There are many examples of patents holding back progress.
Retina scanning is a typical example of this. One group/person holds most of the patents on this tech, how many times have you had your retina scanned? There is an only a few obvious methods to get the job done and the patent holder controls all of them. I guarantee that when those patents expire, we will have mainstream retina scanners everywhere.
For a start:
1. tech patents should have a shorter lifespan.
2. Getting a software patent should be damn nigh impossible.
Don't make your problems my problems!
This has nothing to do with it. IBM actually patents technology they research and develop. They are not patent trolls. IBM spends more money on R&D then almost any other company out there. They earned those patents. They just want to reduce the amount of patents awarded to people when they already have a patent on that technology. Then IBM has to waste money in court showing that the later patent should have never been awarded. It just makes sense both from a business and an ethical perspective. The Patent office needs to wake up and start scrutinizing applications more.
There's the "intellectual property" meme again. Virtual property is unlike real property. If I steal someone's apple, that's a resource he will have to do without. If I copy someone's design, he still has it and can still utilize it. It's thought that treating "intellectual property" as if it were real property, outlawing theft, providing registration, etc. is a good thing, but it's still debateable.
As an IBM employee who has been through the internal patent vetting process, I can tell you that IBM isn't just spouting off about the importance of patent quality, IBM actually does try to ensure that it only seeks patent protection for really worthy ideas.
A colleague and I (mostly him) came up with an interesting approach for quickly and accurately finding the subject's face in an photo taken for an ID card. The idea is that rather than having to carefully adjust the camera before taking the photo, or having to carefully crop the photo afterwards, it's much more efficient to have a fixed camera that covers a sufficiently large field of view that all subjects, no matter what size, will be in the image and then have software automatically identify their head within the image and crop and rescale to get an image of just the head, with the right size and aspect ratio.
I'll admit that it's not any sort of blinding insight, but there were some very clever bits in the way my colleague made it work and made it fast. Not just algorithmic details, either, but some fundamentally good ideas. Further, after we'd implemented it we discovered that there doesn't seem to be another ID photo solution on the planet that works remotely as well. Most of them don't even try to automatically zoom and crop, and those that do suck at it. To the point the 80% of the time the user has to manually adjust the crop.
So, since IBM offers bonuses for patents, we figured that it had enough novelty in it to be patentable, particularly given the crap that gets patented. We filled out the paperwork and got ready for the review board to rubberstamp our application, or maybe point out a few legal niceties that had to be corrected.
They shut us down cold. "Not novel enough". "The usage may have some originality, but the basic ideas are all commonplace". "It's too obvious".
They told us we could work on it and re-present if we wanted, but they were pretty clear that unless we found some more, better, newer ideas, IBM would not pursue acquisition of a patent on our invention. That impressed me, actually, even though I was disappointed to be missing out on the bonus.
I can't say that *all* of IBM's patents are high quality. In fact I'd be surprised if a few dogs don't slip through. But IBM really does try ensure that it only patents real, novel, non-obvious inventions. Probably mostly to avoid paying any more employee bonuses than they have to, but the industry would clearly be a better place if more companies held themselves to the same standards.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
What isn't getting reported (at least not on Slashdot, for whatever reason) is that IBM's current actions are schizophrenic, if you view them in the best possible light. In the worst possible light, these actions can be viewed as an attempt to by-pass the Patent Office. To make absolutely certain that the big guys retain control over the process, and aren't pestered again by the little guys.
A superb example of this is the fact that IBM is ACTIVELY fully supportive of Software Patents, and has even used what appear to be rather bogus ones (against a company which is using Linux, no less), in order to stifle the competition.
I'm speaking about IBM's lawsuit last month against Platform Solutions. Here's one quote and link from a press article:
"IBM's decision to sue Platform Solutions is another indication that the company is becoming more aggressive about defending its intellectual property in an effort to extract more revenue from its extensive patent trove."
There are other links if you do a Google search; but it's pretty clear that IBM wants to keep this as quiet as possible.
The point remains though, that IBM is being extremely agressive with Software Patents, against what appear to be Linux-based products. And anything IBM says about "improving the quality" is utter BS. Their priority is to improve the bottom line.
Sorry if that pops some people's bubbles about IBM. There is no question that IBM has been helpful to the Open Source community. But it's quite clear that this only goes so far. And as long as they are actively working as a Patent Troll to stifle competition, IBM cannot be trusted.
Let us hope that it doesn't go so far as submarine patents. But honestly, I've never seen a big company play nice out of the goodness of their heart yet, when it comes to their competition.
IBM might have struck me as leaning that way before last month. But not any more.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.