USPTO Asks For Input On Software Patents

New submitter MouseTheLuckyDog writes "The patent office is reviewing its policy on software patents and is asking for feedback (PDF). Groklaw reports that the USPTO will be hosting a pair of roundtable sessions in February, during which the public will have the ability to attend and put forth their viewpoints. From the article: 'It's obvious the USPTO realizes there is serious unhappiness among software developers, and they'd like to improve things. Software developers are the folks most immediately and directly affected by the software patents the USPTO issues, and it's getting to the point that no one can code anything without potentially getting sued. I don't wish to be cynical, though, as that's a useless thing. So maybe we should look at it as an opportunity to at least be heard. It's progress that they even thought about having a dialogue with developers, if you look at it that way.' If you can make it to Silicon Valley on February 12 or New York City on February 27, go and make your voice heard."

Comments

Re:Ban them!

[jedidiah]

Computer programs are already treated as copyrightable works. So there would be no new unintended consequences.

Re:I Would Like To Suggest "Accountability"

[Shetan]

Doesn't the U.S. Federal Government have Sovereign Immunity?

Re:Ban them!

[WaywardGeek]

Requiring source code wouldn't do much to discourage software patents.

I'm listed as an inventor on 22 patents so far. Several of them are software patents. I didn't file any originally, until a competitor patented a key software algorithm we'd used for years at a previous company - an algorithm we could not function without. Now I encourage that we patent all company-critical software ideas. Anyway, I've been filing them since the early '90s. My early patents all included full source code, and one has many thousands of lines from our commercial product - enough to actual run the algorithm on real designs. If you have a new logic optimization idea, have you fully disclosed how to implement it if you haven't included a netlist parser? Early software patents included full source code, which gradually was reduced until now a bit of pseudo code in the patent text is generally enough. The old requirement for source code didn't seem to slow patent applications.

Every patent lawyer knows that you can't violate a patent in your head. The same is true if you write an idea down on paper. You also can't violate a patent by writing it down in Notepad on a computer, or even if you save it, and share it with friends. However, if your idea is a sequence of steps a computer could execute, and you "run" it, chance are high that you've just violated somebody's patent. Being a software developer in America is a bit like being an illegal immigrant. You just keep quite, keep your head down, and hope that nobody bothers looking at what you're doing too closely.