U.S. Office Joins an Effort to Improve Software Patents

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Lee Revell <rlrevell () joe-job com>
Date: January 10, 2006 11:01:56 PM EST
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: U.S. Office Joins an Effort to Improve Software Patents

Surprised I have not seen this on IP yet...

U.S. Office Joins an Effort to Improve Software Patents

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.

[...]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/technology/10blue.html

This won't be enough for the vast majority of programmers, who consider
all software patents invalid (as they are really mathematics patents).
But it's a positive step.

Has the Blackberry case (not mentioned in the article) caused the PTO to
finally take an interest in the problem of blindingly obvious software
patents?


Lee



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