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BLOG@IP::JURPatent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.
Saturday, September 16, 2006News from the Community Patent Review Project.A new website WikiPatents.com was established by Mr. Peter Johnson and Mr. Kevin Hermansen both of Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S., to provide - in their own words - "public patent clarity for the world". By now, I can't recognise if there are any relations with the well-known Community Patent Review Project. The letter appears to be going ahead very well by including more and more industrial partners.As expected, Mr. Stallman is not convinced of the Community Patent Review Project as well as of any other projects desiring to improve patent quality: "[...] The project is not just incomplete -- it can backfire, too. When the patent office knows about prior art, it interprets that prior art in the weakest possible way. Courts usually decline to consider any prior art that the patent office has studied. (This is not an official legal rule, but it is usual practice.) Thus, our main chance of invalidating a patent in court is to find prior art that the patent office has not studied. Furthermore, patent applicants can use this information to write patent claims that cover important activities while avoiding the known prior art that could invalidate the claims. The patent office is eager to help patent applicants do this.Take this together with other anti-IP extremist attempts  to establish patent abolition politics in "Pirate Partys".Technorati Tags: Patents
I'm wondering why you describe Stallman's comments as "anti-IP extremism"? What he says is that collecting prior art is not a cure for bad patents, because the US patent office's policy on prior art means that such a database may well be abused. He is entirely correct to say that what programmers need to do their work safely is the abolition of software patents. This is not an anti-IP position. Indeed, it's a pro-IP position because copyright (the most commonly-used form of IP as we all know) is the basis for most investment in software, and software patents directly threaten this. Our experience tells us that there is no definable boundary between the good and the bad software patents (no matter how one defines such labels). Any rule that is designed to filter software patents can be subverted. Specialists make their living from subverting these rules in the name of progress. Prior art databases do not work because it is too easy to subvert the data into a tool for producing more "effective" patents, which means patents that affect more programmers and collect more revenue and are harder to beat in court. All great for patent specialists and all bad for the industry and economy as a whole. When sane people explain why systems are not working, you do the world a disservice by describing them as "extremists". There are real anti-IP extremists out there. Stallman, despite his long hair, is not one of them. His greatest invention, the GPL, is entirely a product of strong IP law, and is the foundation for perhaps the greatest wave of innovation ever to hit IT. Post a Comment
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