A glimmer of light in the patent system

New York Times reports that USPTO has teamed up with IBM, Red Hat, Novell and some universities to provide better visibility to open source for their patent examiners.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office plans to announce today that it will cooperate with open-source software developers on three initiatives that it says will improve the quality of software patents.

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.

This is good news. Even if it's just a small step - they still have to train their examiners to use whatever new system they come up with, and making overworked people to adopt new ways of working can be pretty... straining.

For the IPR-discussion challenged among you: Patents good. Janne like. Janne think USPTO is overworked. Janne think they not have capacity to examine patents well enough. Janne thinks many crap patents issued because of that. Janne thinks many companies taking advantage of this. Janne thinks it is good to help USPTO to work better. Janne thinks more work needs to be done, though. Janne wonders, maybe copyright should be more like patents.

Janne thinks imbecile people will now think Janne said "copyright must be exactly like patents."



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"Main_blogentry_100106_2" last changed on 10-Jan-2006 21:45:05 EET by JanneJalkanen.
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