This week, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) released its annual list of the top patentees, and with almost 3000, IBM earned more U.S. patents than any other company for the thirteenth consecutive year. This is the eighth consecutive year IBM has received more than 2,000 U.S. patents. Our patent leadership reflects a culture of innovation at IBM of which we are justifiably very proud. But just as we did last year, we think it’s important to use this leadership opportunity to help organize and call attention to some very important programs.
A year ago at this time, we made a patent pledge that granted access to more than 500 software patents to individuals and groups working on open source software like Linux. This year, in partnership with the US patent office, the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and members of the open source software community and academia, we are announcing a set of initiatives to apply the power of communities to improve patent quality.
Intellectual Property (IP) and patents are integrally linked to the
innovation marketplace, a point made in just about every major
innovation study. For example, in its December 2004 report, the
National Innovation Initiative
declared that "intellectual property protection is a cornerstone of the
innovation economy" and called for the creation of a 21st century IP
regime that would "build quality into all phases of the patent
process."
Patents are intended to encourage the disclosure of inventions to the
public by granting the inventor exclusive rights to benefit from his or
her invention for a limited period. This helps promote innovation,
because an idea or invention can have many potential benefits beyond
those originally imagined by its creator. In an increasingly
collaborative, interconnected global economy, there is a compelling and
growing societal interest in bringing new intellectual property to the
marketplace as soon as possible and maximizing the overall amount and
quality of innovation.
However, if the quality of the invention covered in patents is low —
that is to say, neither significant nor new — then such patents
actually undermine the common good, thwart the very innovation they
were intended to foster and, collectively may seriously erode trust in
our IP laws and institutions. That is why significantly improving the
quality of patents is such a high priority for us all, and why
improving patent quality is the focus of the initiatives we are
announcing this week.
The first initiative – Open Patent Review – is designed to help make
sure that patents really represent significant progress over what has
been done before, by creating an open, collaborative, community review
within the patenting process to improve the quality of patent
examination. This program, established in conjunction with the USPTO
will allow anyone who visits the USPTO web site
to submit search criteria and subscribe to receive regularly scheduled
emails with links to newly published patent applications in requested
areas. It will encourage communities to review pending patent
applications and to provide feedback to the Patent Office on existing
prior art that may not have been discovered by the applicant or
examiner. We will also work closely with Professor Beth Noveck of the New York Law School to convene a series of Community
Patent Workshops around
the country with patent experts to solicit their advice and help in
developing the most effective possible community patent system.
As its name implies, the Open Source Software as Prior Art initiative
aims to make it easier to find potential "prior art" against patent
applications in the millions of lines of code developed by
thousands of programmers working in open source communities. OSDL will
lead a team including IBM,
Novell, Red Hat,
SourceForge and others in developing a system
that stores source code in an electronically searchable format,
satisfying legal requirements to qualify as prior art. As a result,
both patent examiners and the public will be able to use open source
software to help ensure that patents are issued only for actual
software inventions.
Finally, the Patent Quality Index
initiative will focus on deriving a unified numeric index representing
the quality of patents and patent applications. The effort will be
directed by Professor R. Polk Wagner of
the University of Pennsylvania Law School,
with support from IBM and others, and will be an open, public resource
for the patent system. The Index will be constructed with extensive
community input, backed by statistical research, and will be a dynamic,
evolving tool with broad applicability for inventors, participants in
the marketplace, and the US patent office.
These initiatives bring the spirit of collaborative innovation to the
really difficult challenge of improving the quality of patents. Rather
than just telling the US patent office what we don’t like about the
current system, the public is now invited to turn its interest, even
its “angst,” into a positive force, by working closely with the USPTO
and patent examiners, helping them do a better job in evaluating the
growing volume of applications, and helping improve the overall patent
system. Patent reform is a shared, community responsibility that we
should all participate in, and these new initiatives represent a major
step in empowering us to do so.