Free Patents

Protecting Innovation & Competition in the IT Industry

Examples of software patents.

Most Software Patents are just elementary applications of basic maths or straightfoward user interface generic concepts. 

W3C Investigates Patent Claim on P3P Technology

Intermind recently received a U.S. patent, and has indicated that the patent may be infringed upon by W3C metadata standards, particularly P3P. The patent covers storage and transfer of "consumer" and "provider" information between two computers using a metadata control structure. Intermind has further stated that its "patents cover numerous additional features" of other communications technologies.

Recent software patents have been successfully challenged by the Web community because technology that the patent holder claimed was original, and deserving of patent protection, had actually be invented and disclosed already. Challenging patents by identifying pre-existing technology, referred to as "prior art," often has the effect of invalidating a patent altogether, or at least narrowing the scope of its claims.

W3C has begun researching the validity and applicability of this patent, and is seeking information concerning any software or systems that predate the Intermind patent.

For more information, http://www.w3.org/1999/05/P3P-PatentPressRelease

Patent Searching

We collected some very interesting information from the IPR-Helpdesk about the principles of patent indexing and searching as well as many interesting URLs.

The League for Programming Freedom (Fundamental Site)

  • An Industry at Risk 
    • Any word processor with a separate mode that the user selects when they wish to type in a mathematical formula. 
    • A word processor which marks and makes correction to a document using two additional different colors. [#5,021,972]. 
    • Any spreadsheet that can automatically collapse rows that are hierarchically subordinate to another row. [#5,255,356]. 
    • Any document storage system that has a digital camera to scan in documents, stores the documents on an optical disk, and uses character recognition software to construct an index. [#4,941,125]. 
    • etc. 
Examples of Software Patents

Microsoft tries to patent a W3C standard

Slashdot tells us that Microsoft is trying to put patents on a very useful W3C standard. All developers writing Internet applications would then have to ask for Microsoft permission before using this standard. This is a typical example of the danger of patents on software standards and interfaces. 

LWZ compression and shareware

This article gives an example of how software patents can be harmful, from a shareware author point of view.

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Last update by webmaster on Mon Jun 8 00:23:32 1998