Is Publishing Patent Applications After 18 Months Too Late?
Normally, patent applications are laid open 18 months after the filing date or, if applicable, after the earliest priority date. Now, the New York Times reports on a voluntary action to cut this term by IBM:
"[...] I.B.M., the nation's largest patent holder, will publish its patent filings on the Web for public review as part of a new policy that the company hopes will be a model for others.
If widely adopted, the policy could help to curb the rising wave of patent disputes and patent litigation.
The policy, being announced today, includes standards like clearly identifying the corporate ownership of patents, to avoid filings that cloak authorship under the name of an individual or dummy company. It also asserts that so-called business methods alone - broad descriptions of ideas, without technical specifics - should not be patentable.
The move by I.B.M. does carry business risks. Patents typically take three or four years after filing to be approved by the patent office. Companies often try to keep patent applications private for as long as possible, to try to hide their technical intentions from rivals.
'Competitors will know years ahead in some cases what fields we're working on,' said John Kelly, senior vice president for technology and intellectual property at I.B.M. 'We've decided we'll take that risk and seek our competitive advantage elsewhere.'
The more open approach, I.B.M. says, is intended as a step toward improving the quality of patents issued in general because the process of public review should weed out me-too claims that are not genuine innovations.
'The larger picture here is that intellectual property is the crucial capital in a global knowledge economy,' said Samuel J. Palmisano, I.B.M.'s chief executive. 'If you need a dozen lawyers involved every time you want to do something, it's going to be a huge barrier. We need to make sure that intellectual property is not used as a barrier to growth in the future.' [...]
The I.B.M. policy seeks to address that problem by taking a page from the open-source style of collaboration over the Internet. Just as open-source software is improved and debugged by a far-flung network of people looking at the code and spotting flaws, I.B.M. hopes that a similar process can improve patent quality.
'This is a creative response to that fundamental issue in the patent system,' said Josh Lerner, a professor at the Harvard Business School.
I.B.M. is not the only institution interested in using Internet collaboration to help improve the patent system. Last month, the patent office agreed to try a pilot project of soliciting outside comments on patent filings, including claims of prior art and originality.
I.B.M. is one of several companies that have agreed to submit some patent applications for open peer review as part of the project, beginning early next year. The others include Microsoft, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Intel and Red Hat. [...]"
"[...] In order for innovation to flourish in a global knowledge-based economy, a new set of principles guiding the creation, ownership and equitable exchange of intellectual goods should include the following tenets:
Inventors file quality patent applications for novel and non-obvious inventions of certain scope.
Patent ownership is transparent.
Market participants act with integrity.
IP value is fairly established based on the dynamics of an open market.
Market infrastructure provides flexibility to support differing forms of innovation.
Realistic introductory levels of global consistency exist for all of the above.[...]"
Altogether, IBM acts quite courageously. Apparently IBM wants to play the role of a major pacemaker in the process of a constructive, well-designed patent reform.
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Dipl.-Phys. Axel H Horns is Patentanwalt (German Patent Attorney),
European Patent Attorney as well as European Trade Mark Attorney. In particular, he is Member of:
New York Times reports on a voluntary action to cut this term by IBM: 
