Patent Office Program To Speed Computer Tech

coondoggie writes "Looking to address critics, the US Patent and Trademark Office this week is starting a program to speed up and improve the review of computer hardware and software technologies. The agency is set to launch a peer-review pilot project that will give technical experts in computer technology, for the first time, the opportunity to submit technical reports relevant to the claims of a published patent application before an examiner reviews it. The idea is to get as much knowledge about a particular claim in front of an examiner as quickly as possible so they can make a decision faster, the agency said. IBM, Microsoft, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, CA, and Red Hat have already agreed to review some software patent applications for the one-year community review project. Intel, Sun, Oracle, Yahoo, and others are also part of the project. The pilot is a joint initiative with the Community Patent Review Project, organized by the New York Law School's Institute for Information and Policy.

Re:Should some study be done first

[Kyojin]

Agreed. The patent system was intended to promote innovation by ensuring that individuals and companies would be able to recoup the costs involved in inventing a new product by giving the individual or company a monopoly on that product for a set period of time. In the pharmaceutical industry, billions of dollars are spent on new drugs, most of which never work, let alone go to market. Unless the pharmaceutical companies were sure they could recoup these billions of dollars, there would be no incentive to invent any new drugs.

Software is different, and the patent office has made some attempt to recognise this: You cannot patent an algorithm, but it gets disguised as "a system and method" and the patent is awarded. The costs of "inventing" the things that software companies have patented in the past is next to non-existent. One-Click shopping? I bet that cost a few billion dollars.

If it can be truly argued that these companies spent a large sum of money on software innovation, (note NOT programming, every company does that), then perhaps a patent could be awarded. But these sums of money are likely to be tiny. Perhaps the patent could be awarded for a shorter period of time, perhaps 3 years? Even Debian releases new products at least that often. Or 5 years so that Microsoft can milk us for longer?

Finally a lot of what gets passed of as patentable should come under copyright law. A user-interface is not an innovative means of performing an action. It is a cloudy picture painted over what you're actually doing. Indeed, by publishing a product with a particular user interface you automatically own copyright on that user interface and can sue those who copy you. There is no need to bog down the patent system with something that is already protected and is not even innovative in the first place.

No it doesn't

[Flying pig]

Under first to file in the UK you submit a low-cost provisional application the moment you have the idea. Now you can go and discuss it with VCs etc. and you have established your priority. Only if it then looks like a worthwhile invention, or when you have the funding, do you have to pay the full application costs. What's more, if you decide not to file, the provisional application then lapses to prior art so nobody can come along afterwards and patent it.

The US system has now changed, but under the old system Startup LLC had to keep detailed lab notebooks and probably have them witnessed by an attorney in the US, while in the UK they just had to write up the idea and submit a provisional application. Which is better for a small company?

The US system originated when the US had terrible communications and was designed to deal with the small inventor who had been making something for years in Outer Fencepost, Wyoming, and then Bad Company, NY came along with the railroad and copied his idea. Nowadays, this is not an issue.