by Cynthia Deno
USENIX Marketing Director
<[email protected]>

USENIX Funding Helps Improve the US Patent Process for Software

Invention in software technology, as in other fields, builds on previous advances. Inventions may be patented, unless they can be shown to be duplicative of previous work. In these years of light-speed advance in software development, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has received and granted a rapidly increasing number of patents for software-related inventions. But some patents are better deserved than others.

Unfortunately, there is significant and growing uncertainty and controversy about the right to use a variety of software-related technologies. Software engineers run the risk every day of inadvertently infringing a patent, even though the particular technique being used is old and familiar. Inventors run the risk of having ownership of their contributions assigned to others by the USPTO.

Such controversy and uncertainty translate into a great many dollars for patent royalties, patent litigation, and efforts to avoid the use of materials patented by others. Three major groups are involved, the software industry -- companies that rely on software as well as those that produce it -- the USPTO, and patent professionals, along with individual inventors.

The Software Patent Institute was formed to help improve the patent process. It provides seminars and online access to prior art relevant to software-related technology. SPI has created a large and useful database of source documents -- conference proceedings, journal articles, computer science theses, computer manuals, etc. -- that are not readily available elsewhere. The USPTO is an enthusiastic supporter of the not-for-profit SPI, and patent office staff are frequent users of the database.

The USENIX Association, as part of its "Good Works" Program, recently granted the Software Patent Institute $55,000. This funding comes at an especially important time for SPI: they have a large backlog of material to load into their database but did not have enough money to go forward. This grant, says SPI Founder Dr. Bernard A. Galler, will enable the continued growth and improvement of this increasingly important database resource, which benefits the software community as a whole.

The SPI Database of Software Technologies is accessible online by the public without charge. Along with helping the USPTO issue valid patents in the software field, the database helps software developers avoid the cost of defending against frivolous or otherwise invalid patents, and patent applicants can more easily and inexpensively research their claim.

The USENIX Association is wholly supportive of SPI's mission to catalogue and make accessible source documents and software prior art. USENIX also recognizes the enormous task involved in achieving a more complete database.

The main problems encountered by SPI in building its database are obtaining copyright permissions and then funding the work of scanning and converting to machine-readable form early publications which exist only on paper. SPI staff are very efficient: a monospaced dissertation in Courier typeface can be put on-line pretty quickly. Documents such as the ACM Guides, however, with their tiny type and heavily abbreviated bibliographic entries, pose a larger challenge, as do documents with a lot of non-textual material such as graphs, equations, figures, or code. Nonetheless, even these yield to technology, patience, and time, and the SPI database is growing to provide an ever broader collection of older computer science materials.

For more information about SPI, consult <www.spi.org>.