Wikis to save the patent office?
In a rare moment of potential sense in the U.S. patent, people are seriously discussing the possibility of using wikis to support the public review of patent applications. This is particularly exciting given the particularly sorry state of software patents, where lots of common sense ideas are granted broad, sweeping (and wildly chilling) patents, often when there was clear prior art that the Patent Office didn’t find.
It’s interesting that IBM is a big player in this. On the one hand, they have a ton of patents (including some pretty silly software patents) that are worth an enormous amount. On the other hand, bad software patents have the potential to really stunt certain kinds of open source development, and IBM has seriously hitched their wagon onto the open source train.
Tip of the hat to David Loewi for the original pointer to this Chronical of Higher Ed piece, which was in turned based on this (slightly) longer Fortune piece.
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