[Ecommerce] Patent quality : open source to help?

[Michelle Childs]

 <snip> The US Patent Office is to seek the help of the open source
community in improving patent quality, and IBM is going to lend a hand too

The Patent Office is encouraging participation in all three initiatives
and will hold a public meeting at its offices on 16 February.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/legal/0,39020651,39246274,00.htm
IBM leads US patent pack
Martin LaMonica
CNET News.com
January 10, 2006, 09:30 GMT

The US Patent Office is to seek the help of the open source community in
improving patent quality, and IBM is going to lend a hand too

IBM is expected to announce on Tuesday that it won more US patents than
any other company and that it will participate in three initiatives to
improve patent quality.

For the thirteenth consecutive year, IBM was awarded the most patents =97
more than 2,900 =97 by the US Patent and Trademark Office, according to the
company.

IBM is also expected to detail three multiparty efforts to increase review
of patent applications, in part by tapping open source developers and
collaborative software. Partners include the Patent Office and the Open
Source Development Labs (OSDL), an industry consortium that launched a
"patent commons" for open source communities in November 2005.

The US patent system and the quality of patents are increasingly
high-profile issues in the technology industry. Patents have been the
source of several lawsuits and a number of intellectual-property licensing
firms have emerged.

Although the contents of patent applications are public record and
available to anyone, IBM has worked with the Patent Office to develop the
Open Patent Review, a program to allow people, including academics and
corporate technologists, to easily view the contents of filed patents and
provide feedback to patent examiners.

The system will be designed so people can sign up to receive email or RSS
alerts about patent applications filed with certain criteria, according to
Bob Sutor, IBM's vice-president of standards and open source. IBM is also
sponsoring a Community Patent Web site.

In another effort, the OSDL is hosting a Web site called the Open Source
Software as Prior Art project, which will be designed as a way to search
through existing open source code. IBM, Novell, Red Hat and VA Software's
SourceForge.net are participating.

Sutor said he expects that open source developers will search the prior
art system to find existing software and create a "tagging" mechanism for
labeling and categorising code.

In a statement, the Patent Office said it intends to work more closely
with open source communities.

"Collaboration between the Patent Office and the open source community
builds on the momentum of the open source model," said John Doll,
Commissioner for Patents at the Patent Office. "There is powerful logic in
tapping vast public resources to address the growing public interest in
patent quality."

IBM's Sutor said that growing interest in the patent system and emerging
collaborative technologies make more rigorous reviews "extremely
feasible".

"There's a lot of practical interest and a lot of academic interest in the
patent system," Sutor said. "And I think the community is going to be
extremely motivated to do [reviews]."

The third initiative, the Patent Quality Index, calls for a system to rank
the quality of the patent application. IBM is supporting the work of
University of Pennsylvania Professor R. Polk Wagner, who will direct the
effort.

The Patent Office is encouraging participation in all three initiatives
and will hold a public meeting at its offices on 16 February.



--
Michelle Childs -Head of European Affairs
Consumer Project on Technology in London
24, Highbury Crescent, London, N5 1RX,UK.
Tel:+44(0)207 226 6663 ex 252.
Mob:+44(0)790 386 4642. Fax: +44(0)207 354 0607
http://www.cptech.org

Consumer Project on Technology in Washington, DC
1621 Connecticut Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20009 USA .Tel.:
+1.202.332.2670,Fax: +1.202.332.2673

Consumer Project on Technology in Geneva
1 Route des  Morillons, CP 2100, 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 791 6727