Software patents and prior art

This Tech Talk column originally appeared in The Exponent (University of Alabama in Huntsville), Vol. 32, No. 19 (February 8, 2001). Digitized issue: UAH LOUIS archive. Reproduced here courtesy of that archive.

Want to stick it to The Man and earn at least ten grand for the pleasure?

I’ve written here before about the United States Patent and Trademark Office being far too liberal when it comes to issuing software patents. (“Liberal” is a charitable way to put it; “incompetent” would be a closer match.) Technology companies see the free handouts of government-sanctioned monopolies, and the corporate welfare cheats line up by the thousands to secure their certificates of patent. They then erect “patent walls” as if to suggest that they’ve accomplished something in the same way that Wu-Tang Clan’s Old Dirty Bastard proudly displayed his welfare ID card.

Before you socialists start trying to sign me up for the Green Party Weekly Newsletter, I’m not some foaming-at-the-mouth, anti-corporate crusader. 1 believe in a patent system that protects legitimate inventions, but, in The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co. vs. Supermarket Corp., 340 U.S. 147 (1950), Justice Douglas wrote, “[it] was never the object of [patent] laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures.” In addition, the PTO rewards all “inventions” equally despite the fact that inventing physical devices is much more difficult than designing a new algorithm. The US patent system is in clear need of reform.

Until that reform happens, we have to work within The System. One way to invalidate a patent is by showing “prior art,” i.e., demonstrating that a patent holder isn’t the realinventor. For example, say the PTO awards me a patent for “An Algorithm For Determining the Greatest Common Divisor of Two Integers.” In elementary school, we all learned how to compute GCD using a method attributed to Euclid of Alexandria (who was alive around 300 BC). lf my method were the same as Euclid’s, then Euclid’s algorithm would serve as prior art.

There’s a website called BountyQuest (http://www.bountyquest.com) that allows people to post bounties (starting at $10,000) on valuable information. The most common use seems to be patent invalidation, but it could catch on and sprout into all kinds of different areas. Maybe politicians will use the site to dig up dirt on each other a la Larry Flynt’s rewards for dirt on Republicans during the Clinton impeachment. Currently, the site has three bonnty categories: biotechnology, computers, and mechanical. Hunt down the desired information and collect the cash.