Commentary

Serdar Yegulalp
 

Working Together To Avoid The Patently Absurd

Patent reform may be in the air, but it'll be some time before the real fruits are reaped. In the meantime, we have to maintain our own guard against unfairly-granted patents, something the Open Invention Network's doing proactively with, for instance, the patents at the heart of the Microsoft / TomTom lawsuit.

Patent reform may be in the air, but it'll be some time before the real fruits are reaped. In the meantime, we have to maintain our own guard against unfairly-granted patents, something the Open Invention Network's doing proactively with, for instance, the patents at the heart of the Microsoft / TomTom lawsuit.


More Software Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

OIN's mission in this regard is simple, but bold ideas often are simple ones. Take patents that are the center of any dispute like this one, post them for public review at the Peer to Patent or Post-Issue Peer to Patent sites, each designed for the sake of peer-review of patent grants, and use the input from the crowd to determine whether or not a given patent should have ever been granted. Patent examiners are only human, after all, and the research power of thousands of people put together can turn up far more than any one alone. A set of bullet points on the P2P site sums it all up nicely:

  • Open up the closed patent review process to more information and enable better decision making.
  • Improve the existing system by avoiding the issuance of overly broad patents.
  • Demonstrate empirically the role that non-governmental experts can play in improving decision making.

This isn't just about bashing Microsoft, either, since it could be argued that MS has been just as much a victim of submarine patent abuse as anyone else. It's entirely possible that in some future dispute, a patent posted on the P2P site could be invalidated in their favor, too. In fact, one of the first patents posted for feedback by the OIN was the subject of a lawsuit directed at Microsoft and Google.

A third strategy, aside from reviewing patents that are either at the heart of a controversy or poised to become such, is defensive publication -- documenting something patentable in a public way so that it becomes prior art, and thus makes it unpatentable by third parties. If this sounds like it's part and parcel of the open source approach, it is: what's more open than having your source code available for public review?

But again, that's only the starting point for this kind of work. The whole idea of crowd-sourced patent reform isn't just going to stay confined to the area of software patents -- although, for now, that's where the controversy over patents tends to emerge in its most provocative forms, so that's where it helps most.. I could see, for instance, other review sites like this dedicated to analyzing patents for various industries -- or, when you got down to it, a kind of Wikipedia of public patent analysis that's subclassified by industry. That's not what the OIN has in mind -- they have their hands full with what they have right now! -- but it makes for an intriguing next step. Any takers?


Learn more about all the latest products and technologies at TechWeb's Interop Las Vegas, May 17-21. Join us (registration required).


Follow me and the rest of InformationWeek on Twitter.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links