From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.8 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_50 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: 4 Feb 93 14:42:08 GMT From: news.byu.edu!eff!world!srctran@gatech.edu (Gregory Aharonian) Subject: Patent Office Reform Panel Final Report Message-ID: List-Id: 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 -- ************************************************************************** Greg Aharonian Source Translation & Optimiztion P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178