Nickname: Jonathan

Review: The recent patent statistics presented weekly in the Wall Street Journal by Dow Jones and Patent Board is an indication of how important these issues are for investors.

Date reviewed: Jan 10, 2007 12:28 AM

Nickname: Roderick Klein

Review: The U.S. patent office and the European patent office simply do a bad job approving software patents. It sounds cruel to put it like that, but when you see how many basic patents are being approved you really wonder how big and extensive this database must become to improve patent quality. The beginning of the article: "It had won a patent for putting multimedia information on a disk." Does that tell you us enough? http://www.webpatent.com/patents/p5241671.htm In view of the foregoing, it should be apparent that a need still exists for a database search system that retrieves multimedia information in a flexible, user friendly system. It is, therefore, a primary object of the invention to provide a search system in which a multimedia database consisting of text, picture, audio and animated data is searched through multiple graphical and textual entry paths. The claim alone should have been enough to throw it out the window the patent request! We need very strict patent laws!

Date reviewed: Jan 15, 2006 4:48 PM

Nickname: Sundar

Review: This is really interesting. The efforts of the ongoing group (consisting of some open source developers & others) should be helpful to proprietory vendors also. Though it seems to be a mammoth task, this should be started at least now to avoid huge confrontations on the IP laws relating to software.

Date reviewed: Jan 15, 2006 10:54 AM

Nickname: Andrew

Review: This article is incorrect in stating that patent No. 5,241,671 "bit the dust." In fact, the patent survived the PTO reexamination. It was reissued and is now owned by Encyclopedia Brittanica, which has sued several companies for infringing the patent. See Civil Action A-05-CA-359-LY in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, Austin Division.

Date reviewed: Jan 14, 2006 7:53 PM

Nickname: Charlie

Review: Will anyone from the PTO be accepting comments, suggestions, or ideas from those of us outside the big company arena? If so, will our comments be taken seriously?

Date reviewed: Jan 14, 2006 4:20 PM

Nickname: OpenSourceDoesntHaveTheMoney

Review: In the third-to-last paragraph, John Doll, commissioner of patents, states that "the open source community is going to fund this effort." Maybe someone can inform him that most open source is created by developers who end up making no money and therefore cannot fund such an endeavor. It is no wonder why this situation is such a mess. Thank God we have such enlightened lawmakers.

Date reviewed: Jan 13, 2006 9:54 PM