Steve Toub wrote:
|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?
|
|My very stab in the dark--after attempting to read these several times
|and having my eyes glaze early and often--is that the patents do seem
|broad. ... And that it's prohibitively expensive for either of them to
|try to enforce their patents on any open source discovery systems that
|the library community that do this (Evergreen, Koha, Solr Flare, etc.)
I'm no patent expert, but I have read a lot of patents related to
information services (e.g., how Magellan and Google work), software
(e.g., how certain software products work), and musical synthesis (e.g,
synthesizer technologies). You noted that "the patents do seem broad".
This is very deliberate in EVERY patent, because patents want to cover
as much merchandisable ground as possible for the sake of unanticipated
areas of future profit. These broadness "wings" only get "clipped" via
court action, whether it's through infringement of a prior patent (which
may have been missed in patent searches) or demonstration that "the idea
is so obvious that anybody could come up with it" (and, therefore, it
can't be patented). And to make it to court with such arguments
requires really deep pockets--that's where the "chilling effect" (to use
copyright terminology) comes into play. One recent example was SCO's
five billion dollar lawsuit against IBM regarding Unix/Linux. How many
libraries (or library companies) have, say, an extra $5 billion lying
around for possible infringement lawsuits? Another recent example in
the patent arena was the Blackberry-related lawsuit a couple of years
ago.
That's the "bad news". One aspect of "good news" is that, even though a
patent often tries to grab a whole field, it is particularly attempting
to profit from a specific *implementation* of a larger, perhaps
unpatentable, idea. (I think that may be the case with the patents
mentioned in the original message: these seem to be particular methods
of implementing faceted organization and searching.) Some other "good
news" is that there seems to be an increasing emphasis on the
"obviousness" argument against granting a patent, that is, that what a
patent is attempting to protect and profit from can't be something that
any knowledgeable person in the field could easily have come up with--it
has to be uniquely and creatively "unobvious" to be patentable. And,
finally, one other "good news" aspect of patents is that the term of a
patent is considerably less than a copyright term. The "bad news" flip
side is that I would bet that there will increasing legal pressure
(especially from pharmaceutical companies) to extend patent terms just
as was done with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
I hope I shed more light than heat (or ignorance). ;-)
Harvey
--
===========================================
Harvey E. Hahn, Manager, Technical Services Department
Arlington Heights (Illinois) Memorial Library
Desk: 847/506-2644 -- FAX: 847/506-2650 -- E mailto:hhahn_at_ahml.info
Personal web pages: http://users.anet.com/~packrat
Received on Wed Jan 31 2007 - 16:42:30 EST