Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital has a good post on the value of patents after fighting for 8.5 years to get one of his granted. His Half.com (Ebay.com) patent received six rejections, half of them final, before it was allowed. I explain this to clients, particularly software startups, on a daily basis - good patents are often very hard to get, you will receive many rejections, and it will be very expensive to respond to those rejections with no guarantee that you will ever be granted a patent. Fire your patent attorney if he fails to explain that to you.

This might sound funny from someone who makes his living writing and prosecuting patents, but I have counseled many potential clients away from patents. Instead, I encouraged them to spend their initial funds on product development while keeping me abreast of their developments so we can file the right patent application, at the right time, that provides the most value to their business. There is no simple answer to the question of whether or not to patent, but the comparatively small amount of money spent on early consultations with a good patent attorney can set the stage for a valuable and well informed patent strategy. Some additional thoughts from Ask The VC (1, 2).

Links: Half.com Patent 7,373,317, First Round Capital, Redeye VC, Ask the VC.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) released version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). GNU GPL is a free software license. According to FSF, almost three quarters of all free software packages are distributed under the GNU GPL license.

Links: The Free Software Foundation, GNU, List of Software Licenses, GNU General Public License.

You can now search patents with Google. Google Patent Search covers the entire collection of patents made available by the USPTO, from patents issued in the 1790s through those issued in the middle of 2006.

Links: Google Patent Search (via lifehacker)

Some sites to search non-patent prior art:

CiteSeer
IBM Research
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Scirus

Web 2.0 + Patents = Patents 2.0? The Peer to Patent Project aims to design and pilot an online system for peer review of patents. Established in conjunction with the USPTO, and sponsored by IBM, this program will encourage communities to review pending patent applications and to provide feedback to the patent office on existing prior art that may not have been discovered by the applicant or examiner.

“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.”

Links: The Peer to Patent Project, Project Wiki, Project Blog.

U.S. Patent No. 7,011,528 was recently issued to the inventors of the widely used Medical Emergency Response Simulator (MERS) computer program. The patent was written and prosecuted by Elliot Furman. MERS is used by Emergency Medical Service (EMS) workers for primary, refresher and recertification training. The product evaluates the worker’s performance in compliance with Department of Transportation (DOT) standards.

Links: U.S. Patent No. 7,011,528 “Method and system for generating a skill sheet”, MERS.

In a bid to stimulate the market for the Linux operating system, IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony have joined forces to support the Open Invention Network (OIN). OIN will acquire Linux related patents. The patents will be available on a royalty-free basis to any company, institution, or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux operating system or certain Linux related applications.

Links: OIN Press Release, Reuters story, Open Source Development Lab (OSDL).

Open Source Development Labs announces patent commons project.

Also: Software Freedom Law Center, Public Patent Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation Patent Busting Project, Microsoft on patent reform.

Code Patents is offering an RSS newsfeed of software related patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office. The patents are evaluated by a human before being added to the feed so as to eliminate non-software type patents.

Luxembourg has taken the issue of software patents off of the agenda of next week’s meeting of the European Parliament.

Sparks will be flying next week in Brussels as Europe makes a decision on whether to formalize the granting of computer-implemented inventions such as software patents. Software patents are controversial, and opposed by many (1, 2, 3) on the grounds that they stifle innovation and benefit large companies. Nevertheless, it is probably inevitable that Europe (UK Patent Office FAQ) follow the US in their software patent policy.