FYI - U.S. Office Joins an Effort to Improve Software Patents

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Subject: FYI - U.S. Office Joins an Effort to Improve Software Patents




From: "Bergeron, Donald L. \(LNG-DAY\)" <>
To: <>
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2006 11:03:36 -0500














 Office Joins an Effort
to Improve Software Patents 











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Published: January
10, 2006



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New York Times technology reviewer David
Pogue is at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show, posting blog entries and
daily video updates.


The patent office has
come under increasing pressure in recent years from critics who contend that it
issues patents without adequate investigation of earlier inventions. As a
result, conflicts over published patents have loosed an avalanche of
intellectual property litigation.

At a meeting last month with companies and
organizations that support open-source software (software that can be
distributed and modified freely), including I.B.M., Red Hat, Novell and some universities, officials of the patent office
discussed how to give patent examiners access to better information and other
ways to issue higher-quality patents. 

Two of the initiatives would rely on recently
developed Internet technologies. An open patent review program would set up a
system on the patent office Web site where visitors could submit search
criteria and subscribe to electronic alerts about patent applications in
specific areas.

The third initiative is focused on the creation of a
patent quality index that would serve as a tool for patent applicants to use in
writing their applications. It is based on work done by R. Polk Wagner, an
intellectual property expert at the .

"This is a great example of how the patent office
can reach out to the community and how they can help us where we have
difficulty getting prior art," said John J. Doll, the commissioner for
patents.

The patent office has held similar discussions with
other technology industries including biotechnology, nanotechnology and
semiconductors, he said.

The open-source project, being led by I.B.M., aims to
build an automated system for creating a series of categories to organize
software written by open-source programmers. The system would then be made
available to help patent examiners search for earlier examples in patent
applications.

Mr. Doll said that Google had participated in the discussions and it was possible
that its search technology would be used in the project. 

Jim Stalling, vice president for intellectual property
and standards at I.B.M., said, "We think that this initiative will lead to
greater certainty in the patent system." He added that any improvement in
the general quality of patents would lower the costs of defending patents, and
that money could again be focused on financing research and development.

One frequent critic of the patent system, Gregory
Aharonian, publisher of The Internet Patent News Service, said it was unlikely
that the new initiatives would have a significant impact, because the patent
office was not able to deal efficiently with the information it already had.

"If the patent office can't figure out how to use
the resources they already have," he said, "what is the point?" 

Diane Peters, general counsel for the Open Source
Development Laboratories, a corporate consortium backed by Linux supporters,
said that if the initiatives were successful it might lead the patent office to
issue fewer but higher-quality patents.

Separately, the patent office plans to announce today
that I.B.M. once again topped the list of private-sector patent recipients in
2005. The company received 2,941 patents last year, compared with 3,248 patents
in 2004. 







Regards, 

Don 

Donald L. Bergeron

Systems Designer

LexisNexis



O 937-865-1276

H 937-748-2775

M 937-672-7781 




















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