A Glimmer of Hope on the Patent Mess Horizon

Andy Updegrove writes “IBM, Novell, Redhat and others are announcing today three new initiatives with the United States Patent Office (PTO) that are intended to spot software patent claims that the PTO should not grant, and to spread the word about bad patents that issue anyway. The initiatives are directed in particular at avoiding problems for the open source development community, and will therefore strive to make existing open source code – and the inventions that may be found in that code – known to patent examiners so that new patents will not issue that may be asserted against open source software. A unique feature of some of the initiatives will be the ability of private parties to highlight specific “prior art” to patent examiners before patents issue.”