Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> IBM Establishes Worldwide Patent Policy to Promote Innovation
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Inspired by a two-month, online forum involving dozens of experts, IBM
> | today formalized a new, groundbreaking corporate policy governing the
> | creation and management of patents.
> `----
>
> http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/20325.wss
>
> Interpretation here:
>
> IBM Adopts Open Patent Policy
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | IBM clearly hopes that this move will increase pressure on other companies
> | to accelerate efforts to improve the quality of software patents, which is
> | an issue of interest and concern to a broad audience, and particularly
> | those that participate in the development of, or that use,
> | open source software.
> `----
>
> http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20060926075902953
Keep in mind that IBM is often viewed by lawyers as "deep pockets".
Unethical lawyers often go after IBM using frivilous patents on
technology that predates emacs and UNIX.
IBM has been in the software business since the 1940s, and has
technology history that dates back even further back, yet there are
those who would try to sue IBM, claiming to have recently patented
"inventions" that IBM has used for 40 to 50 years.
SCO is trying to sue IBM for disclosing technology that dates back to
MVS, DOS/VS, and OS/400, over 30 years old. Had IBM filed for a patent
on this technology, citing so much prior art that the patent itself
would have been rejected as "intuitively derived from available prior
art", it would have made all of this technology a matter of public
record.
I'm just waiting for some whiplash lawyer to try and patent the "heap
sort" and then try to sue IBM and Oracle for violating their patent
rights. The irony is that current patent office law actually makes
this possible.
> Related:
>
> Patent review goes Wiki (an Open Source approach)
>
> ,----[ Excerpt ]
> | The problem: an epidemic of shoddy patents.
> `----
>
> http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/08/21/8383639/index.htm?source=yahoo_quote
It's really amazing. Even Microsoft has had to cite prior art from the
Free Software Foundation to defend itself against patents which were,
in effect, fraudulently obtained, by omitting mention of prior art
which would have likely resulted in a rejection of the patent
application as intuitively derived from prior art.
Ironically, one of the best sources for prior art, are the usenet
newsgroups. many of the "devices and claims" were posted to
net.sources, comp.sources, and alt.sources over the last 40 years.
Open source software contributed to FSF, SunSite, and other public
repositories are often ignored during patent searches for prior art,
even though the invention itself may be based on, and intuitively
derived from such prior art.
Ironically, this could make the patent office a huge repository for
open source software used as references in related patents.
At least, if such prior art were made part of the "official" public
record, the patent that were granted would be more credible in meeting
the requirements of being original and not intuitively derived from
publicly available information.
Such disclosures could also have the side-effect of nullifying
previously granted patents.
If someone were to cite web site software published in open source in
1993 or 1994, that was published by an undergraduate contributing to
open source, it could nullify such patents as "one click order" or
other patents widely used and enforced even today.
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