ESP Wiki is looking for moderators and active contributors!

Difference between revisions of "Raising examination standards"

(Related pages on {{SITENAME}}: * Applicants paying for patent review)
Line 22: Line 22:
 
* [[RSA patent]]
 
* [[RSA patent]]
 
* (USA) [[The Patent Reform Act]]
 
* (USA) [[The Patent Reform Act]]
 +
* [[Applicants paying for patent review]]
  
 
==External links==
 
==External links==

Revision as of 10:51, 20 October 2010

Red alert.png What this entry documents is not a solution.
This practice may be ineffective or useless in the long term.
ESP's position is that abolition of software patents is the only solution.


When people talk about patent reform, they are usually referring to proposals to raise examination standards by making the criteria stricter or tougher, and increasing the resources available to patent examiners.

The result would be to reduce the number of software patents granted. This would be helpful, but it wouldn't solve the problem. It only takes one software patent to destroy a small business or ruin an interoperability standard.

When encouraging the raising of patent examination standards, it's very important that your work is not misunderstood as showing support for "high quality" software patents. Always phrase your support like: "Raising the standards is a step in the right direction, but even 'high quality' software patents are harmful to society. The right thing to do is get rid of software patents entirely".

Minor Counterpoint

One way to raise the bar "sufficiently" would require adherence to keep annually awarded patents to something like a handful (perhaps not far off par with Nobel Prize awards). This could be accompanied with required narrowness (eg, not over fundamental algorithm or observation but a very precise advanced one). Additionally, have this accompanied with a shorter duration period (no more than half the current duration, though ideally just a few years). And tack on as well other restrictions, such as that this could not form part of a significant standard unless very generous terms were allowed (eg, compatibility with the licenses of most FOSS) and/or that noncommercial or research use would be allowed. In short, with enough limitation to software patents, the few granted could become fairly innocuous overall yet allow those with reservations about abolishing the system feel like they still can get some sort of lottery ticket or backup to where they fear a free market might fail.

Partial countering the counterpoint is a quote from Why_abolish_software_patents: "because going from source code to running binary is effectively a trivial step, applying patents to the running machine wholly pre-empts all the more balanced protections and safeties from copyright law."

Arguably, avoiding copyright denial would apply 100% of the time, but it is a possibility that courts would want to set some limitations if enough evidence was presented for some specific case or other.

Related pages on ESP Wiki

External links