Hi all,

I thought this would be of interest to list readers.

Has anyone tracked these proposed software projects?

Joe --- Joseph Kiniry School of Computer Science and Informatics UCD Dublin http://secure.ucd.ie/ http://srg.cs.ucd.ie/

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The New York Times January 10, 2006 U.S. Office Joins an Effort to Improve Software Patents By JOHN MARKOFF

The United States Patent and Trademark Office plans to announce today that it will cooperate with open-source software developers on three initiatives that it says will improve the quality of software patents.

The patent office has come under increasing pressure in recent years from critics who contend that it issues patents without adequate investigation of earlier inventions. As a result, conflicts over published patents have loosed an avalanche of intellectual property litigation.

At a meeting last month with companies and organizations that support open-source software (software that can be distributed and modified freely), including I.B.M., Red Hat, Novell and some universities, officials of the patent office discussed how to give patent examiners access to better information and other ways to issue higher-quality patents.

Two of the initiatives would rely on recently developed Internet technologies. An open patent review program would set up a system on the patent office Web site where visitors could submit search criteria and subscribe to electronic alerts about patent applications in specific areas.

The third initiative is focused on the creation of a patent quality index that would serve as a tool for patent applicants to use in writing their applications. It is based on work done by R. Polk Wagner, an intellectual property expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

"This is a great example of how the patent office can reach out to the community and how they can help us where we have difficulty getting prior art," said John J. Doll, the commissioner for patents.

The patent office has held similar discussions with other technology industries including biotechnology, nanotechnology and semiconductors, he said.

The open-source project, being led by I.B.M., aims to build an automated system for creating a series of categories to organize software written by open-source programmers. The system would then be made available to help patent examiners search for earlier examples in patent applications.

Mr. Doll said that Google had participated in the discussions and it was possible that its search technology would be used in the project.

Jim Stalling, vice president for intellectual property and standards at I.B.M., said, "We think that this initiative will lead to greater certainty in the patent system." He added that any improvement in the general quality of patents would lower the costs of defending patents, and that money could again be focused on financing research and development.

One frequent critic of the patent system, Gregory Aharonian, publisher of The Internet Patent News Service, said it was unlikely that the new initiatives would have a significant impact, because the patent office was not able to deal efficiently with the information it already had.

"If the patent office can't figure out how to use the resources they already have," he said, "what is the point?"

Diane Peters, general counsel for the Open Source Development Laboratories, a corporate consortium backed by Linux supporters, said that if the initiatives were successful it might lead the patent office to issue fewer but higher-quality patents.

Separately, the patent office plans to announce today that I.B.M. once again topped the list of private-sector patent recipients in 2005. The company received 2,941 patents last year, compared with 3,248 patents in 2004.