Unfortunately, U.S. patent law creates disincentives for searching through patents, even though one of the main justifications given for the patent system is that the patent teaches the public how to practice an invention that might otherwise be secret. Willful infringement subjects the infringer to enhanced damages when they are aware of the patent and intend to infringe, and reading patents increases the probability that subsequent infringement will be found to be willful. Moreover, we find that developers often assume that the patents they discover are broader in scope than they actually are, and thus such developers become overly or needlessly worried. If, despite this, you do intend to conduct a patent search, you should seek legal advice first.
That said, I'm happy to live and work in Europe where we don't need to deal with this crap.
Thankfully, Art. 52 of the European Patent Convention is pretty sensible in that it does not regard discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods, aesthetic creations, and "schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers" as patentable subject matter.[1]
[1] http://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal-texts/html/epc/2010/e/...
As for PCT. Patents enter the national or regional phase and get examined against the local patent law. Some countries may be inclined to rubber stamp already granted patents (saving time and money). Certainly USA searches for PCT used to be the only ones that were guaranteed _not_ to be thorough!
Something where someone could submit a piece of prior art and for each of the claims in the patent describe how the prior art invalidates that claim. Plus some sort of discussion forum for people to discuss the prior art.
A few companies did launch in this space about a decade back (offering bounties that would be paid by companies getting sued over the patents), but no-one seems to have really succeeded in gaining traction.
The Patent Office itself should crowd-source the software community looking for prior art before a patent is issued in the first place.
1. Software for a general-purpose digital computer is equivalent to a mathematical algorithm, and therefore not statutory material for a patent.
2. If the all the novelty and non-obviousness in a claim is contained in software, then that claim is not patentable.
3. Software as an element of an otherwise patentable claim does not make the entire claim unpatentable. This is nothing more than the complement of 2. Don't read it in any way inconsistent with 2.
4. Don't read 3 in a way that's inconsistent with 1 and 2. Pay attention to 1, 2 and 3. They are the policy.
Like my policy? I hope so, but they'll never listen to it. If they don't listen to the Supreme Court, they won't listen to anyone. 1 is Benson, 2 is Flook, 3 is Diehr, and 4 is Bilski.
As far as I can tell, Apple has patented something that has been produced before, and the website is requesting evidence of that to undo the patent?
I was hoping to use this program to build support for, and ultimately raise enough money to request, ex parte reexaminations of issued patents.
Would any of you have interest if I kept pushing for that idea?
Commercial example: http://www.articleonepartners.com/ "The World's Largest Patent Research Community"
Though apparently they've filed a patent application for crowdsourced vetting for compensation... http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/11/startup-crow...
The general trick is to try to craft a very broad 'initial' search that will encapsulate all of your results; you can create sub-searches within that set of retrieved documents (limited to at most around 3,000) at no additional cost.
This makes it really strange then when you attempt to patent a software algorithm. What is the physical part? Am I allowed to make a book containing original descriptions of patented algorithms? How is that different from sharing code on the web?
Patenting software algorithms is akin to patenting speech itself, which is protected under the first amendment. So I think the "math" thing does matter. A lot.
When Amazon patented A 1 click button. They were not talking about an algorithm, they were talking about the idea of having a button which purchases the object I want with 1 click. Implementation of this is wide, this patent tells me nothing of what the process behind the patent should be. If it did then you could get around it. That's the fundamental issue with those patents as you've pointed out. I can't figure out what is or isn't an implementation of this patent because no real useful implementation instruction was given.
On the other hand The Marching Cube algorithm patent does fit what you are talking about, the is instruction on how to implement the algorithm and those kind of patents have some issue for sure too. The claim against it was that it's a completely obvious way to solve the problem. There are alternatives to this algorithm such as the (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_Tetrahedrons) which is just redoing the same thing another way, so it's at least better to me than the 1 click patent.
Software patents in general are wrong, I'm not arguing against that but saying all software patents do is patent algorithms is not strong enough an attack in my view. When people will look at it they will see putting multiple algorithms together to solve a problem in a non obvious way is in a way no different then putting a bunch of smaller components together to create a new device. I don't believe patenting either really helps promote innovation. (I'm pretty much anti all patents).
(3) Paragraph 2 shall exclude the patentability of the subject-matter or activities referred to therein only to the extent to which a European patent application or European patent relates to such subject‑matter or activities as such (emphasis added)
This is where I imagine much of the confusion lies. My interpretation combined with a brief search on google seems to indicate that software could make its way into patentable subject matter if it's a subset of a larger system, but not if its the sole "invention" claimed in the patent.
In other words, if you have a hardware device running embedded software, you could patent the device, including in it "programs for computers." Thus, Art 52 doesn't mean that all inventions including computer software are, as a matter of law, not patentable.
There have been several instances, however, where large American companies have tried to get Europe to allow software patents. Luckily so far all of these have been blocked:
Nonsense. We have software patents in Europe too.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Euro...