The New York Times has a piece out today on IBM’s latest responsibility in patenting initiative. It seems that Big Blue will advertise its pending patents. Some details:
The policy, being announced today, includes standards like clearly identifying the corporate ownership of patents, to avoid filings that cloak authorship under the name of an individual or dummy company. It also asserts that so-called business methods alone – broad descriptions of ideas, without technical specifics – should not be patentable.
No blind-siding competitors with surprise lawsuits from submarine patents? No trying to own broad ideas (like…oh, I don’t know…multi-role, multi-class educational groupware, for instance)? How refreshing!
Note that IBM is taking this step despite the fact that it will cost the company:
Patents typically take three or four years after filing to be approved by the patent office. Companies often try to keep patent applications private for as long as possible, to try to hide their technical intentions from rivals.
“Competitors will know years ahead in some cases what fields we’re working on,” said John Kelly, senior vice president for technology and intellectual property at I.B.M. “We’ve decided we’ll take that risk and seek our competitive advantage elsewhere.”
Nobody can claim that this is a throw-away for IBM–that it is donating patents that it has already written off as worthless. This policy goes for all their patent applications. Why are they doing this? Because they have come to believe the current environment of patent litigation damages innovation:
“The larger picture here is that intellectual property is the crucial capital in a global knowledge economy,” said Samuel J. Palmisano, I.B.M.’s chief executive. “If you need a dozen lawyers involved every time you want to do something, it’s going to be a huge barrier. We need to make sure that intellectual property is not used as a barrier to growth in the future.”
That’s it in a nutshell. That’s the problem with the Blackboard patent. If you need a dozen lawyers involved every time you want to develop educational software, it’s going to be a huge barrier. IBM has it right.
