Patent Implications for CAP
Farrel Lifson
Despite the claims of the patent being seemingly obvious to me (a database query into a cell towers location registers) and incredibly broad in scope, the patent exists and is therefore ready to be used in costly and time consuming litigation.
Has OASIS or a body such as the WMO released any kind of advisory on existing patents which might affect CAP based systems? Is there any work being done by OASIS to limit the effects of future patents on the open standards that it administers or to curate a knowledge base of prior art?
Regards,
Farrel
Farrel Lifson
Regards,
Farrel
Art Botterell
In any event it's an open secret, I think, that the patent process has run amok and is having a crushing effect on innovation, especially by small businesses. And I fear the recent patent "reform" legislation in the U.S., with its switch from first-to-invent to first-to-file, will only accelerate the rush to file on everything imaginable, further overloading the Patent Office's already dubious capacity to evaluate the actual merit of applications.
The net effect, I fear, might be called the "Innovators Double-Bind": Only large corporations will be able to accept the risk of defending against random patent challenges, but their relatively high internal costs will mean that only the most profitable opportunities are pursued. Thus many innovations will become like the so-called "orphan drugs"... valuable and even life-saving tools that aren't profitable enough for large companies to bother, but with high enough barriers to market entry that small "disruptive" ventures can't afford to fill the gap.
Not meaning to draw us off topic here, but only to point out that this is simply one instance of a very broad problem with very broad implications. ("When innovation is outlawed only outlaws will innovate.") It's in no way limited to the domain of alert and warning.
- Art
James Bryce Clark
On Feb 21, 4:19 am, Farrel Lifson <farrel.lif...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I recently came across across the following patent * * *
Hello Farrel. You asked what OASIS does about "nearby" patents.
There are, of course, a lot of patents, applications and assertions
out there. Many are broad. Some turn out to be defensive tactics
rather than monetization strategies. Many that are granted without
much scrutiny, in some aggressive jurisdictions like the US, might
someday turn out to be unenforceable claims to prior art. Others
undoubtedly are valid and significant.
But no-one in the open standards community acts as an insurer of those
uncertainties, or a third-party claim evaluator. Nor could we,
practically speaking.
What we *do* (speaking generically about SDOs but also specifically
OASIS) are these things:
-- Assure that all who choose to participate as members in our
technical projects make specific promises about licensing, as applied
to our published standards;
-- Encourage communities and markets to inquire and work with patent
claimants, if there's an assertion of infringement.
-- Encourage open standards experts to engineer around methods that
have unresolvable claims against them.
In this case, here's what OASIS looks for: assertions, addressed to us
directly, that the use of one of our structured data standards,
according to its conformance criteria, would infringe a patent
claim. (And that's the right inquiry for us: commercial implementers
might go fishing around broadly, when they make plans, trying to
identify anything that might be even vaguely related to a proposed
product; but standards bodies focus on what's required to implement
the work we publish.)
And I'm aware of no such assertion or communication to us, in this
case. While I and others do sometimes see unofficial chat in places
like Google Groups, we don't necessarily see them all. Ad-hoc chat-
rooms, while a great thing for some kinds of development, aren't a
reliable forum for formal standardization work. So no formal
response is called for on this one, from our side, per our rules.
Informally, if someone thinks there's a problem there, have you just
picked up the phone and asked the claimant? If you think that would
be a helpful conversation, and would like some suggestions about who
to contact, we're happy to provide some to the folks who develop CAP.
Regards
Jamie Clark
James Bryce Clark, General Counsel
OASIS: Advancing open standards for the information society
http://www.oasis-open.org/who/staff.php#clark
[Note: please address any communication directly to e-mail, not via
chat boards or etc., as we don't regularly monitor the latter.]
Farrel Lifson
I am worried that the patents I listed, which directly target the Alert and Emergency Warning sectors (as if the content of the messages they send should somehow make them patentable!), might be used to 'submarine' (wait till a system is up and running with customers and then threaten to litigate) CAP based and other alerting systems in the future.
Art Botterell
> I am worried that the patents I listed, which directly target the Alert and Emergency Warning sectors (as if the content of the messages they send should somehow make them patentable!), might be used to 'submarine' (wait till a system is up and running with customers and then threaten to litigate) CAP based and other alerting systems in the future.
I'm afraid they could. The closest thing to good news I can offer is that warning systems rarely make a great deal of money, which might make them somewhat less attractive as targets for patent trolls. But the threat of that sort of predatory behavior is certainly present.
Which brings us to the next question... is there anything to be done about it?
- Art
Farrel Lifson
This is a concern for a much larger audience than the CAP community, we just need to be aware that patents such as these exist.