There is an article on p9 of today's London Financial Times with the headline "Eyes reopening to the benefits of biometrics", by Maija Palmer. It starts

The market for creating biometric identification technology using the human iris is set to see rapid growth next year, thanks to the expiry of a patent that has stifled development over the past 20 years.

The idea of using the iris as a way to identify people was discovered in the mid-1980s by US-based ophthalmologists Leonard Flom and Aran Safir, who patented the concept and created a company known today as Iridian Technologies.

[This is the excerpt available at

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/65143ac6-7e58-11da-8ef9-0000779e2340.html

without having to subscribe.]

It goes on to claim that Iridian was very aggressive at defending its patent rights; "any business that so much as looked into iris recognition was warned off by Iridian's lawyers". The article goes on to comment on the rapid growth of competition in the field since the US expiry of the patent, with many new companies releasing products. Iridian's CTO is reported as saying that the patent was both a blessing and a curse --- many potential clients, particularly governments, were reluctant to do business with the only supplier of a technology. As well as the worries about Iridian's stability as a company, "they worried ... that in the absence of competition the technology was not as highly developed as it could have been." The rest of the articles talks about the possibility that with new suppliers emerging, the technology might well see more widespread use.

The general impression I got of the article was that the patent system did not do its job here --- a broad patent on a "concept" was granted and competition in the field, and therefore public accessibility to the technology, suffered greatly. I would claim that iris recognition would count as a "software patent" --- there is nothing too difficult in the physical realm of capturing the image. It is not a trivial one (like Microsoft's "is not" patent), yet here is a case where it did not result in increased availability of innovation to the public. The arguments and situation are probably equally applicable to non-software patents as well, i.e., this is more an "anti-patent" data point than an "anti-software-patent" data point, but I thought it interesting that the FT was so negative about the effects of the patent here.

(The iris recognition algorithm and ideas are pretty cool --- John Daugman's website http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/jgd1000/ has details. I went to a seminar a few years ago where he presented the ideas and it was very interesting stuff.)

Worth sending on to FFII if anyone has suitable contact information?

Ben.