"Prior art" is the way to attack patents such as these, as Nancy states.
The Open Source Development Laboratories has an "Open Source as Prior Art" site at http://osapa.org/. The goal is to protect innovation by reviewing, and challenging as necessary, "poor quality" patents that threaten the development of new software tools.
One of the projects OSDL supports is the "Peer to Patent Project: Community Review" (http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/), in which community experts review patent applications submitted by USPTO to find prior art, particularly in the Open Source arena, that invalidates the patent claims. Perhaps libraries should join this effort!
From the site:
The Community Patent Project aims to design and pilot an online system for peer review of patents. The Community Patent system will support a network of experts to advise the Patent Office on prior art as well as to assist with patentability determinations. By using social software, such as social reputation, collaborative filtering and information visualization tools, we can apply the "wisdom of the crowd" - or, more accurately the wisdom of the experts - to complex social and scientific problems. This could make it easier to protect the inventor's investment while safeguarding the marketplace of ideas.
Danielle Cunniff Plumer, Coordinator
Texas Heritage Digitization Initiative
Texas State Library and Archives Commission
512.463.5852 (phone) / 512.936.2306 (fax)
dplumer_at_tsl.state.tx.us
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu]On Behalf Of Nancy Cochran
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 11:50 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Patents on faceted navigation: what's the impact?
Steve Toub wrote:
>
> Both Endeca and Siderean have been awarded patents on aspects of faceted
> navigation.
> Endeca's is U.S. Patent No. 7,035,864
>
> Siderean's is U.S. Patent No. 7,146,362
> I'm wondering if someone with an understanding of legal language and the
> patent process than provide insight on what impact this might have on
> next-generation discovery systems that provide faceted navigation. Also,
> does anyone know what they plan to do with these patents?
I have not reviewed the Siderean patent but, in my opinion, after a
reasonably careful review, I believe that the Endeca patent ' 864 will not
hold up in court if challenged. Neither will a similar U. S. patent
assigned Endeca, # 7,062,483 and issued a couple months later. Their
difficulty, in my opinion is that the technology they claim has been
described by others before they filed their patent applications.
See for example, the work of Uta Priss at the School of Library and
Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington. One paper is at
http://www.upriss.org.uk/papers/asis99/pdf. It was published in 1999,
before Endeca's submission to the patent office data,May 18, 2000. For a
longer list of Priss references, search Google Scholar using "uta priss."
I think I have a Priss paper that gives a long list of references going
back a lot farther than 1999 but I can't locate it at the moment, so maybe
my memory is wrong and the list exists somewhere in my environment under
some other author's name. If I need it, I'll find it.
Full disclosure: I also use patents to try and control some of my work. It
is not in my interest for Endeca to patent facets and/or clusters. When I
saw their patent, I wrote an internal document that carefully compares
their claims to a patent of mine submitted in 1986. In my opinion, in 1986
my co-inventor and I disclosed everything that Endeca claimed in 2000. We
were claiming a technology that had nothing to do with clusters but
clusters were a nececarry part of our work. We didn't claim
clusters/facets because even then we thought that such ways of grouping
choices were known.
To the advantage of the people who now see the value of facets and
clusters, if my judgements are correct, no one can make propietary claims
on facets or clusters. I believe this is true partly because my colleague
and I disclosed the technology in a U. S. patent application filed Sept.
19, 1986 and partly because the technology has been described in the
literature for a long time.
Nancy, I learn from this list almost every day, Cochran
nancy.cochran_at_earthlink.net
Received on Wed Jan 31 2007 - 15:44:12 EST