Open-source allies go on patent offensive

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Downside

1. Rapidly evolving, churning of the technology (by-product of its youth, or other root cause?) results in no standards of terminology or basis for classification.
2. Without a classification basis, no reliable patent search system can be formulated.
3. Non-patent literature, what we outsiders would call open source, accounting for 80% or so of prior art, is an order of magnitude more complex to search, and defiant of all known search algorithms.
4. Patent lawyers, who make a living disguising claims, further obfuscate applications to frustrate the prior art search (this is their standard ploy, but examiners are far beter armed in the stable arts).
5. Examiners are essentially helpless. Grants are virtually automatic, with the full knowledge of the legal community that almost all are invalid.
6. The patent holder has a piece of paper of dubious value.
7. Developers have no way of even estimating how many patents they are infringing. Of those infringed, how many are valid?
8. Federal Trade Commission openly questions the effect of the software "patent thicket" on innovation.
9. U.S. patents, previously on a par with EPO, no longer have value in the courtroom.
10. Jon Dudas acknowledges he is running an "agency in crisis."

Not a pretty picture, and not one amenable to quick fix. The underlying question is, what is the problem that applying the device of patenting to software was supposed to fix? Why did the U.S. do it in the first place, other than a previous Commissioner of PTO deciding to take an easy way out on a court ruling, leaving his successors to reap the wind? Possibly of the best exemplars of the old adage, "of it ain't broke don't fix it" (maybe, if it ain't broke don't break it).

Posted by: IT_User   Posted on: 08/11/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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