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.
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