Patent Office Reform Panel Final Report

Patent Office Reform Panel Final Report

[Gregory Aharonian]

    Last year, the Patent Office sponsored a committee to review current
patent practices in the United States.  Last fall they issued their final
report, which contains many interesting suggestions, including first to
file, software patents, excessive secrecy orders, international harmonization,
challenging patents, reexamination, excessive legal costs and other issues.

    Two issues of interest to comp.lang.ada are secrecy and reuse.  Part 
of the report deals with the DoD's excessive use of secrecy orders on
certain patent applications, even after the Cold War is over.

    The second deals with a growingly contradictory DoD software policy.
On one hand, the DoD supposedly is all excited and behind software reuse
and open repositories.  On the other hand, more and more DoD and Branches
offices are getting into applying for software patents in order to make
money with software technology transfer (and which screws up reuse efforts
greatly).

    I have posted to  misc.legal.computing, misc.int-property and
comp.software-eng    five files which contain the complete text to the
Patent Office's report.  If you are interested in such stuff, they make
great reading.  A paper version is available from the Patent Office.

     I would like to thank Noah Friedman, Toni Emerson, Keith Berrier, Glenn
Tenney, Rahul Dhesi and Jude Wilkinson for all contributing ten dollars to
help me defray the cost of acquiring for $60 a $1.50 diskette from the Patent
Office with these files.

    Gregory Aharonian
    Source Translation & Optimization
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Greg Aharonian
Source Translation & Optimiztion
P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178