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Patent Office Program To Speed Computer Tech
coondoggie writes "Looking to address critics, the US Patent and Trademark Office this week is starting a program to speed up and improve the review of computer hardware and software technologies. The agency is set to launch a peer-review pilot project that will give technical experts in computer technology, for the first time, the opportunity to submit technical reports relevant to the claims of a published patent application before an examiner reviews it. The idea is to get as much knowledge about a particular claim in front of an examiner as quickly as possible so they can make a decision faster, the agency said. IBM, Microsoft, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, CA, and Red Hat have already agreed to review some software patent applications for the one-year community review project. Intel, Sun, Oracle, Yahoo, and others are also part of the project. The pilot is a joint initiative with the Community Patent Review Project, organized by the New York Law School's Institute for Information and Policy.
I just wish they would make it retroactive to all the other patents currently awarded.
Compeditors have more to gain from a patent portfolio+cross licensing agreement then they do from invalidated patents. Unless we have public review or honest people reviewing this won't work.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Realize that software is not a patentable innovation.
The use of patents has seriously gotten ridiculous and has made me lose faith in the US Patent Office.
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
How long until we start seeing reports of rejected patents, that are later submitted by the big companies involved in the peer review?
"from the foxes-guarding-the-henhouse dept."
That's basically what this is.
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"You spilled my egg... I needed that egg."
Agreed. The patent system was intended to promote innovation by ensuring that individuals and companies would be able to recoup the costs involved in inventing a new product by giving the individual or company a monopoly on that product for a set period of time. In the pharmaceutical industry, billions of dollars are spent on new drugs, most of which never work, let alone go to market. Unless the pharmaceutical companies were sure they could recoup these billions of dollars, there would be no incentive to invent any new drugs.
Software is different, and the patent office has made some attempt to recognise this: You cannot patent an algorithm, but it gets disguised as "a system and method" and the patent is awarded. The costs of "inventing" the things that software companies have patented in the past is next to non-existent. One-Click shopping? I bet that cost a few billion dollars.
If it can be truly argued that these companies spent a large sum of money on software innovation, (note NOT programming, every company does that), then perhaps a patent could be awarded. But these sums of money are likely to be tiny. Perhaps the patent could be awarded for a shorter period of time, perhaps 3 years? Even Debian releases new products at least that often. Or 5 years so that Microsoft can milk us for longer?
Finally a lot of what gets passed of as patentable should come under copyright law. A user-interface is not an innovative means of performing an action. It is a cloudy picture painted over what you're actually doing. Indeed, by publishing a product with a particular user interface you automatically own copyright on that user interface and can sue those who copy you. There is no need to bog down the patent system with something that is already protected and is not even innovative in the first place.
FTA
"IBM, Microsoft, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, CA and Red Hat have already agreed to review some software patent applications for the one-year community review project."
Wait... so large companies with lots of existing patents have volunteered to review new patents in the field to try and help the examiner dismiss them? Was not the patent system set up in part to encourage small inventors and entrepreneurs? Could this be an even more obvious conflict of interest?
"Technical experts in the computer arts registering with the CPRP website will review and submit information for up to 250 published patent applications, with no mare than 15 patens being accepted from one applicant/company at a time, the USPPTO said."
250? Drop in the bucket? Only 15 at a time from one company sounds like convenient plausible deniability for organizations that file hundreds per year.
"Consent will be obtained from all applicants whose applications are volunteered and selected for this pilot... Some applicants today can wait up to four years for a first response on software applications. The idea with the pilot is to shorten that wait considerably."
So you can either go to the end of the line or get to run the gauntlet of the entrenched companies trying to help dismiss your patent?
What meeting between a startup and Microsoft doesn't result in the startup getting screwed?
Unless the pharmaceutical companies were sure they could recoup these billions of dollars, there would be no incentive to invent any new drugs.
I don't even like your Patents don't really serve the public interest here either, because we don't really need pharmaceutical companies in the first place. One sign that our kleptocracy has completely warped our thinking is this strange assumption everyone makes: if drug companies don't make lots of profits inventing new drugs, nobody will have any incentive to invent drugs.
We really don't need pharmaceutical companies. The public wants access to a wide range of cheap effective medicines. So we have a natural incentive to invent new drugs because we keep getting sick and dying. There are plenty of ways to solve the problem. A straightforward one would be to create public drug discovery laboratories, fund university labs, and pay for scientists to find the drugs. That's a "tax and spend" solution. We decided on a solution where we replace our natural incentive for better drugs with Pfizer's incentive to get rich selling them to us.
That works to the extent your desire for better drugs remains compatible with the perogatives of a for-profit corporation. Sometimes it isn't. A company makes more money by developing treatments as opposed to cures. It saves money by making copycats of drugs already shown to be profitable, like penis pills. They concentrate their efforts on diseases with the widest markets, and don't do much research into rare diseases. And of course they spend a lot of time looking into what they should do if they want to pull even more money out of your pocket. My wife and I are still young but we each have our own chronic neurological problem. Just the copays on these prescriptions are exploding. Ours are running about $150-200/month. And the trail of patents and monopoly rights left behind by this process is undesirable in and of itself, even if getting them did provide the company's incentive. For one thing, the patents rise into the atmosphere and do not expire for years and years. The air becomes clogged with patents and they accumulate into a dark cloud that casts shadows and disincentives upon drug research below- no matter who is doing it. So our current path isn't sustainable.
There is plenty of incentive to invest in new drugs as long as people are sick and dying. Even if a private company isn't interested, there are enough people who do that research, and sufficient public interest in getting it done, to ensure that it will get done, even if nobody is getting rich running commercials for me-too penis pills. Only patents could screw it up.
if("Microsoft".equals(patent.client.name) ) {
approve(); return;
}
else if ("Google".equals(patent.client.name)) {
approve(); return;
}
else if ("IBM".equals(patent.client.name)) {
approve(); return;
}
else {
inspect(); return;
}
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