EFF Report: Patents and the Public Domain
EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, announced on their blog today the release of Patents and the Public Domain: Improving Patent Quality Upon Reexamination a report finding that there are at least three ways to work toward improving patent quality, including through reexamination:
1. Encourage Organized Efforts to Have a More Thorough Review of Patent Applications* Increase third party efforts to improve prior art searches and to facilitate a stronger understanding of the world of prior art.
2. Support Organized Efforts After Patents Have Been Issued
* Reexaminations should be limitless in time and with no financial harm limitations (in many countries, public interest organizations like EFF are only allowed to challenge issued patents for a short period of time after they have issued, even though often a patent’s threat to innovations may not be immediately obvious).
* Don't Streamline. Maintain a variety of options for reexamination requesters.
3. Increase Access to Information in the Patent Office
* Update information in the patent office’s online databases regularly.
* Conduct and publish regular evaluations of effectiveness and performance within the Patent Office.
In addition to providing an organized effort through the Patent Busting Project in furtherance of the second goal, EFF is working in conjunction with Mozilla, Yahoo, and the Internet Archive to create a database that will work to achieve the first goal. This Prior Art project is still under development.
The wiki page set up for this contains the project plan for a software prior art initiative under consideration and welcomes constructive input. At the bottom of that wiki page, they point to four related projects:
The Software Patent Institute Database of Software Technologies is contained exclusively in the IP.com Prior Art Database. While limited searching can be performed for free as a "guest", robust and unrestricted searching along with all-inclusive document downloads is available in weekly, monthly, and yearly intervals. Get started searching SPI data today - click here for more information.
