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Dudas, IBM's toilet queue patent, and patent quality

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

Nate Anderson at Ars Technica on March 27 wrote: At a talk today at the Tech Policy Summit in Hollywood, Dudas shed some light on why companies file such patents in the first place, and what his office hopes to do about it.

Although not specific, Dudas was talking about IBM's US patent 6,329,919 titled System and method for providing reservations for restroom use (also to IBM but later withdrawn), which has been discussed on IPBiz. Nate Anderson didn't bring the point home, but IBM, and many of the other IT entities calling for patent reform, are the entities filing these silly applications, and sometimes getting issued patents. Many of the intellectual property reformers, who gladly talk about the Smucker peanut butter and jellly patent (now actually gone), simply will NOT talk about some of IBM's more curious patents. The Ars Technica piece didn't get into the current situation, or note that the proposed new burdens would be unlikely to change IBM's strategy. Anderson's piece is really a non-starter.

Further, Nate Anderson falls victim to the Quillen/Webster assertion that patent grant rate correlates with quality: These things don't "promote innovation," as Dudas noted, but they do make increasing economic sense for many businesses. The result has been predictable; a surge in bad applications. Over the last 40 years, the USPTO granted 62-72 percent of all patent applications, but that number has been dropping. In the first quarter of this year, only 43 percent of applications have been granted.

Anderson quotes Dudas on the likelihood of patent reform: Will the reform bill pass? Though generally unwilling to make positive predictions on legislation, Dudas does believe that the bill has more than a 50 percent chance of passing during this session of Congress, and it could come up for a vote within the next few weeks.

See also:

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/03/future-of-computing-at-ibm-trivial-or.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/02/ibms-patent-app-for-method-and.html

Full post as published by IPBiz on March 27, 2008 (boomark / email).