Patent case seeks to silence Nuance voice recognition

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Why software patents suck

I used to be a patent examiner. Software patents are in a terrible state, for 3 reasons:

1. Officially, there is no such thing as a software patent. This is because patents are not recognized for abstractions, such as scientific advances. You can patent only a device. Hence, a "software patent" is a complex way around this that tries to patent every possible implementation of an algorithm. The question of what constitutes duplication of an algorithm, rather than duplication of a device, has thus never been addressed by the patent office or by the courts.

2. Patents are supposed to be objective. There is a law saying that a patent application can be denied if the invention is "obvious". In the good old days, a patent examiner could decide, using their presumed expertise, whether an invention was "obvious". Now, however, in order to make all patent examinations more "objective", the examiner must follow a set of rules, using their own judgement as little as possible. The rules essentially say that nothing is "obvious" unless it has either been done before, or someone has suggested the exact same thing in a public forum before.

3. Everyone knows the patent system is broken. Legislators have been trying to reform it for the past year. But all the lobbyists who go up to Congress to "help" fix it represent big companies. They don't care about the problems with the meaning of "obvious". They just want to "reform" the law so that people with less money don't have an equal chance to use the system. The way the system currently works is that initial examinations are more-or-less assumed to be crappy. Contested cases will be resolved in court. However, it costs about 5 million dollars to take one of these cases to court, and that's if you win. Anyone other than large companies is thus stuck with having to bow down to crappy software patents. (The situation is even worse in the rest of the world, where patents are much, much more expensive.)

Posted by: shagbark   Posted on: 11/09/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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