Patent medicine

Very interesting article on the Patent Law blog re changes going on in the US patent system with respect to the software / business model patents - essentially they argue that even Google could be impacted by the changes:

The apparent death of Google’s pioneering PageRank patent under the PTO’s new rule for patentable subject matter may be a cause for celebration among those who are philosophically opposed to property rights in innovation and are eager to confine the patent system’s ambit. It will surely be cause for mourning among those who believe that allowing patents on cutting edge technologies has served the country well for more than two centuries and that a radical departure from the traditional approach would be unwise. And it is likely to generate puzzlement among business people and innovators, who may wonder how agency decisions supposedly premised on the need for ensuring that “that the patent system be directed to protecting technological innovations”[22] have ended up rendering unpatentable innovations in search engine technology, computer modeling, bioinformatics and many other innovations in cutting edge fields related to software and information technology.

I would counter this by arguing that the current regime, or rather that operant over the last 10 years or so, has been abused in the opposite directions - people have been allowed to patent what is essentially prior art merely by arguing it is in a new software medium, and it created a market for patent trolls, corporate patent banking and so on - the activity by the US Patent Office in rescinding much of this is to be applauded in my view.

As with all pendulums, the risk is that it swings too far the other way, but 'tis - in our view anyway - better that it swings, as right now it is far too easy to enclose common knowledge .

Now something I did not know re Google's technology is also alluded to in the article:

Stanford owns the patent, and Google holds a perpetual license on the technology that is exclusive through at least 2011

Now those words Stanford owns, Exclusive and 2011 are very interesting - there is a sense that all this is happening at a time when it is fairly moot for Google anyway, they have potentially far greater risk here. The Search market from 2009 - 2011 will be a very interesting one indeed methinks......