SINGAPORE, Jan. 12, 2007 -- IBM announced that it will develop
and host the "Inventors Forum," an online initiative to share and
debate ideas on how smaller enterprises view patent systems and can
contribute to reform efforts such as improved patent quality.
IBM made the announcement as IFI Claims released the United States
Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) annual list of the top
patentees. With 3,621, IBM surpassed its own record and earned more
U.S. patents than any other company for the fourteenth consecutive
year, exceeding the next closest patentee by 1,170.*
A number of individuals and small and mid-sized companies have
already agreed to participate in the forum, including inventor
Lonnie Johnson, patent holder of many inventions in thermodynamics
and best known as the inventor of the Super Soaker® water gun. The
company also has reached out to venture capitalists and others who
play a role in the evolution of smaller businesses, to join the
forum in the second quarter of the year and share their views on
the issues affecting their participation in the intellectual
property marketplace. IBM believes this dialog with a group whose
needs often are underserved can help accelerate successful patent
reform efforts.
"Meaningful patent reform must address the needs of all
constituents. This Inventors Forum can help accelerate patent
reform efforts by bringing a diverse spectrum of opinions together
to collaboratively develop solutions for a robust intellectual
property marketplace," said Herbert Wamsley, executive director of
the Washington, DC-based Intellectual Property Owners
Association.
With companies and governments focused on innovation to create
economic growth, the number of patent applications from individuals
and companies of all sizes is skyrocketing. According to the U.S.
Small Business Administration, small companies earn nearly 15 times
the number of patents per employee as large enterprises. Patents
have become a principal means of establishing value for the
creators and users of knowledge-based assets. As vital as patents
are to large companies such as IBM, they are just as vital to
smaller entities whose businesses or aspirations are built around a
smaller number of patents.
"Smaller companies long have been the 'silent majority' in the
invention community, said Andy Gibbs, CEO of PatentCafe, a
publisher of IP management software solutions. The sheer number of
patents they generate obscures the fact that they do not have a
means to actually collaborate and participate with one voice in the
invention system. The Inventors Forum will empower these companies
to voice their ideas for improving the patent system and brainstorm
with peers around the world."
These small companies often lack the resources to help them
effectively and productively navigate the process and rules for
obtaining a patent, maintaining ownership, and then converting
patents into marketable products and services. In addition, because
individual inventors and small business are a heterogeneous group
in geography, technology and industry, there are few opportunities
for them to collaborate on these and other IP interests and
issues.
"With individuals and smaller companies comprising a significant
percentage of the invention that occurs around the world, it is
important that we provide a forum to understand their concerns and
issues if we want to improve the overall health of our patent
systems," said John E. Kelly III, IBM senior vice president of
Technology and Intellectual Property. "The goal of this initiative
is to enable representatives of a broad segment of the invention
community to voice new ideas for improving how they participate in
the system and become part of the solution to the challenges our
patent systems face."
IP Marketplace discussions
The Inventors Forum follows on the "Building a New IP Marketplace"
project from a year ago, which focused on issues affecting
primarily larger enterprises. In the IP Marketplace project, wiki
technology was used to enable a forum of worldwide intellectual
property experts to develop consensus around several thorny issues
such as quality, transparency and the validity of business method
patents.
The collaboratively developed document resulting from that effort
led to the adoption by IBM of a new patent policy. Key tenets of
the policy are that patent quality is the responsibility of the
applicant; that patent applications should be open to public
examination and that patent ownership should be transparent; and
that business methods without technical content should not be
patentable.
Momentum in patent quality initiatives
The Inventors' Forum will help further advance the goals of the
patent quality initiatives IBM announced a year ago. The prevalence
of patent applications that are of low quality or poorly written
have led to backlogs of historic proportions, and the granting of
patents protecting ideas that are not new, are overly broad, or
obvious. IBM believes raising patent quality will encourage
continued investment in innovation by individuals, academic
institutions and companies of all sizes, while preventing the
over-protection that works against the public interest.
Last January, IBM launched a series of patent quality initiatives
including Community Patent Review and Open Source as Prior Art.
Both of the initiatives are intended to augment the relevant
information available to patent examiners. The USPTO featured these
initiatives in their recently announced strategic plan. In
addition, the USPTO will participate in a pilot of Community Patent
Review starting in 2007.
Professor Beth Noveck of New York Law School is leading Community
Patent Review and several companies have lent their support to the
project since it was announced.
Open Source Development Labs continues to lead a team from the open
source software community working with the USPTO on Open Source as
Prior Art. This initiative has already yielded benefits to the
USPTO in the form of the identification of new tools and sources of
prior art.
The final initiative is the Patent Quality Index which seeks to
define a quantitative metric for the quality of patents. Professor
Ronald Mann of the University of Texas Law School is leading the
project.