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:

1. Software Patent Institute
2. Open Source as Prior Art
3. Patent Commons
4. Peer to Patent Project

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.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

In a recent post on GigaOM, Daniel Berninger argues for the creation of a prior art database of software innovations.

The antidote to software patents involves creating their exact opposite — a formal process of contributing software innovations to the public domain. Vonage’s experience, however, illustrates that the various standards-creating processes represent only a first step. A successful open-source model for patents requires creating a searchable archive of prior art in which inventors contribute their innovations in order to get protection from subsequent litigation.

This would replace the patent office’s dependence on the oath signed by patent applicants “acknowledging the duty to disclose all information known to be material to patentability.” Vonage’s decision to base its technical implementations on the work of the VoIP Forum and IETF seems reasonable. Who would have guessed the patent office granted Verizon a patent on the same subject matter?

...

A formal process of filing prior art to the public domain will protect an emerging infocom industry better than just depending on overworked patent examiners and applicants for prior art searches.

Such a system exists, already. The Software Patent Institute (SPI) is a nonprofit corporation formed to provide prior art related to software technology with the intention of improving the patent process.

Founded in 1991, the Software Patent Institute (SPI) is a nonprofit corporation formed to provide prior art related to software technology with the intention of improving the patent process. We strive to aggregate hard-to-access software data which is not readily available online or in electronic form elsewhere. Our source documents include computer manuals, older textbooks, journal articles, conference proceedings, computer science theses, and other such materials which may contain valuable prior art.

The Software Patent Institute is dedicated to providing information to the public and assisting the United States Patent and Trademark Office and others by providing technical support in the form of educational and training programs and providing access to information and retrieval resources concerning software prior art.

The SPI has received strong encouragement from the USPTO, and its mission has been endorsed in reports or resolutions from the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), the Advisory Commission on Patent Law Reform, the Computer Business Equipment Manufacturers Association (CBEMA), the Software Publishers Association (SPA) and the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA).

The Software Patent Institute has among its members some who believe strongly in the desirability of patents for software-related inventions and some who are strongly opposed to patents for software-related inventions. SPI deliberately takes no position on this issue, or on any particular patent or litigation. We believe that there is a current lack of readily-available information concerning software technology, and we are attempting to help solve that problem.

The Software Patent Institute Database of Software Technologies consists of descriptions of software technologies. Each record in the database is all or a portion of a source document that is generally not readily available on-line or in electronic form elsewhere; source documents include computer manuals, older textbooks and older journal articles, conference proceedings, computer science theses, and other such materials, since these are where pointers may be found to prior art.

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.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks