Cleaning up the patent system

An interesting article on dubious patents ("Owning the Future: Patent Pollution", by Seth Shulman) appears in the July/August 2001 issue of Technology Review Magazine.
Shulman points out, "as almost anyone in the intellectual-property game will tell you, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office continues to grant patents that are, well, patently invalid. I'm talking about patents for things that have either already been invented or are so straightforward and apparent they don't meet the patent's law requirements for being novel and nonobvious."
He continues, "For years, people have griped about these bogus patent claims . . . And the patent office has long promised to do better. But now two Web-based ventures, IP.com and BountyQuest, are taking their own steps to rein in bad patentsóeither by stopping them before they are granted or by knocking them out after the fact. What makes these startups really interesting is that they are attracting support across a broad spectrum of intellectual-property players — from patent system boosters to open-source programmers. In the polarized IP field, that is no small feat."

IP.com is a partner with Foresight in the PriorArt.org project, a joint venture that gives open-source and free-software developers the chance to 'defensively publish', and place their innovations in a searchable software database.

Bioscientists back an "open source" library

from the Straight-to-the-source dept.
Senior Associate John Gilmore calls our attention to an item on the movement to create an open public library of scientific papers that appeared on the New Scientist website.

A model archive, called "PubMed Central", was set up by Harold Varmus when he was director of the US National Institutes of Health. Major journals which already deposit their papers there include the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the British Medical Journal. Supporters of the idea urge other scientists to sign a petition calling for the library, and to boycott journals unwilling to participate in the scheme.

As of the end of March, more than 12,000 scientists from 120 countries have signed an open letter in support of the Public Library of Science initiative. As a result of this initiative, several scientific publishers have already decided to adopt the policy advocated in the open letter, and almost every publisher and scientific society is discussing it. You can find out more, and add your signature to the petition, at http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org.

Problems with patenting genes

from the 3-billion-years-of-prior-art dept.
A lengthy article on the serious problems with gene patents appears in the April 2001 issue of The Washington Monthly ("Gene Blues: Is the Patent Office prepared to deal with the genomic revolution?" by N. Thompson). Taking a look at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), the author notes:
A crucial issue of public policy has been put into a legal and scientific box. That may not be the PTO's fault, but it's everyone's problem. According to Arthur Caplan, who serves on the ethical advisory board to Celera, "We have this space-shuttle biotech. But its navigation system is Santa Maria level in terms of the ethics."

1-click patent suit: Barnes&Noble win a round

from the what's-obvious? dept.

A federal appeals court declared that "BN has mounted a substantial challenge to the validity of the patent in the suit." The case has been sent back for further proceedings. The Internet E-Newsarticle is discussed on Slashdot, where "Artagel" gave a link to the court decision. Cases like this are defining what can be turned into intellectual property.

Gilmore on nanotech & copy-protection

from the what-do-you-mean-replication-is-illegal? dept.
Senior Associate John Gilmore of EFF has written this item on the problem of copy-protection including the connection to nanotech. John prefaced it with: "My latest missive about copy-protection. I tie in the big nanotech angle toward the end. I have to sneak them up to it because they think I'm crazy if I lead with it. Feel free to reproduce this. If you publish it far and wide, let me know so I can feed you corrections as they come in from the critics…" Sounds like John would appreciate feedback, so add your comments below.

Encouraging open IP

from the sorry,-that-idea-is-taken dept.
ChrisPhoenix writes "In many technologies of nanotech, including software, patents are frequently used anticompetitively. One solution is to make ideas and technologies publicly available. Open Source is doing this for software. However, more is needed to prevent bad patents from being issued in the first place.

Foresight is thinking of working with IP.com and Santa Clara University Law School to provide a way to inexpensively publish open-sourced technologies where the patent office will see them, in order to clearly establish prior art.

We are also planning one or two IP conferences to be held early next year."
[Read More… for the details.]

Why genes in nature shouldn't (or should) be patented

from the I-own-the-code-that-makes-your-liver dept.
Confused about the rationale behind the patenting of genes found in nature? Find out by reading Technology Review's Sept/Oct 2000 story by Antonio Regalado The Great Gene Grab. An excerpt: "However, when it comes to human genes…legal precedent offers a way around that prohibition, namely that genes captured and identified in the lab arenít in their natural form…From the point of view of patent law, a gene is just another man-made chemical." Also of interest in that issue: The Case for Gene Patents by William A. Hazeltine, whose comments on atomic-scale engineering have been cited favorably here on nanodot, and Toward Sharing the Genome by Seth Shulman, author of the book Owning the Future.

Money for info on prior art to stop bad patents

from the reform-through-online-coordination dept.
Senior Associates Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly, along with Charles Cella, have a new project: "BountyQuest is the world's first high-stakes knowledge marketplace, on a mission to strengthen the patent system. We pay large cash rewards to people who can help find evidence critical to issues of patent validity. BountyQuest revolutionizes information searches by connecting the experts who have the information with the people who need it through our "Broadcast Reward System·" Simply put, BountyQuest offers monetary rewards for hard-to-find information. We support an on-line community of scientists, engineers, and professional researchers who have valuable knowledge that can help their field, their industry, and the world community. BountyQuest's first mission is to reform the patent system by providing the prior art searches required to insure that only true innovators have patents." Thanks to Bennett Smith for this pointer.

Protecting ideas from being patented

from the stop-the-"Enclosure"-of-thought dept.
Foresight is looking at the question of how to make it easier to protect one's inventions from being patented. Such ideas must be publicly disclosed; see IP.com for one approach. Senior Associate (and computer security expert) Norm Hardy reports: "I wrote this note about two years ago. It is about just the subject that you raise. It is also an example of ideas that we wish to protect. Most of our ideas relate to software; however, I see no reason that protecting programming ideas and nanotech ideas differ in this regard. In addition to the ideas presented it seems feasible to pay AltaVista or Google to index the site or sites with the ideas. Google can even qualify searches by URL."

"Letter from 2020": Logical conclusion of current IP trends

from the garden-of-pure-ideology dept.
Found on Slashdot: A not-so-fantastic extrapolation of current IP trends called "Letter From 2020" by Mark Summerfield. "The saddest subversive I met claimed to be a programmer. He said that he was writing a program using Basic.NET. He must have been insane. Even if his program worked he wouldn't be allowed to run it. How could one person possibly check every possible patent infringement in a program they wrote? And even if he hadn't infringed he couldn't sell it without buying a compatibility license from Microsoft.NET and who could possibly afford that?"

0
    0
    Your Cart
    Your cart is emptyReturn to Shop