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42. Post Filing Appendix: Reasons for Abandonment of Patent Process Claim

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On 17^th June 2005, the anniversary of my meeting with IBM, ¹⁵⁸⁹ an interesting event, which led to a chain of other interesting events, I posted this copy of my abandoned U.S. provisional patent application ¹⁵⁹⁰

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My reasons for abandoning it may be summarised as follows:

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1. I have serious reservations about software patents, and the conflict between their claimed intended purpose (encourage invention) and what they actually do, or are used to do (hinder, slow down innovation).

6311

a. After having used Gnu/Linux for several years, (and this experience in relation to software patents), my conclusion on Software Patents and their effect on software innovation, software quality and reliability, is that they are problematic and do more to hinder than to promote innovation.

6312

b. More software innovation and software diversity occurs in the space that exists without them, and the software that results is frequently more reliable and of higher quality. The GPL ultimately secures this space for software.

6313

2. I also had problems with my starting the patent process so late in the development of SiSU. Had I intended to go this route, I should have started the process several years ago.

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a. SiSU is based on ideas that date back to my time at the University of Tromsø. ¹⁵⁹¹ Indeed with the basic idea, I went about equipping myself with the best tools I could find to implement it. ¹⁵⁹²

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b. The question of publication was in issue. I was always open about what I was trying to do: I gave presentations of SiSU from the start (though it had not yet been named) to whoever was interested, and at a couple of convenentions; I published the first versions of this web page on the subject in November 2002 describing SiSU in considerable detail, and; prior to that there were notes on the website lexmercatoria, ¹⁵⁹³ and; the output of lexmercatoria gave some indication of what SiSU was trying to achieve. I took the ultimate step in publishing SiSU _sauce_ on January 4^th, 2005 when the source code for SiSU was placed to the Net and announced on ruby-talk.

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3. The cost of acquiring a Patent is high (tens of thousands of US dollars), ¹⁵⁹⁴ and the cost of defending a Patent, should it be violated is prohibitive (hundreds of thousands of US dollars). There is a high threshold of entry into the Patent game. Patents are primarily for large players, or those that can afford to play, and/or wish to sell to larger players.

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Why then did I start the process in the first place? A good question. The short answer would be, to give myself time to think. ¹⁵⁹⁵

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A longer answer. After the meeting with the IBM software innovations evaluator, ¹⁵⁹⁶ it was indicated that this idea could be of value to them. ¹⁵⁹⁷ He also indicated that to be prepared to pay anything substantial for this technology coming from me, there would have to be a patent, otherwise they would prefer to prepare their in-house equivalent, and they would not mind employing the number of coders it took for the time it took, he explained that this was their way. This led to interesting discussions on the subject of Software Patents. He thought they might actually prefer to (have to) pay a substantial amount for such a Patent, because it gave control over the technology, i.e. they could prevent competitors from doing the same. The choice for me it seemed was between much or little, and I needed time to think. The provisional patent approach cost least and gave me a year within which to file for the Patent... but I had all the reservations about Software Patents mentioned previously.

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Taking the first step on the road to procuring a Patent, resulted in some interesting thinking and correspondence. One idea was an "FSF Patent" Trust

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The idea was to acquire a Patent and to grant free use of it, with the scope of free use defined as use compatible with the GPL ¹⁵⁹⁸ so for all Free Software Foundation ¹⁵⁹⁹ approved software licenses, and "guaranteed" by some form of trust that was held by an independent third party institution. The beneficiary in the event that the software was licensed for non-free use would be the inventor. It remains of academic (intellectual and legal) interest, whether and how such a device could have been made to work.

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The potential offered by the ideas behind SiSU are interesting. The Patent would have gone for the jugular, as patents seek to do, covering a wide range of potential application, based at heart on a simple but essential idea.

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SiSU is available for download and use on the Gnu/Linux and Unix operating systems under the terms of the GPL ¹⁶⁰⁰ (with the possibility of an alternative license for developers unable to use the GPL. (this dual license, being what I would have sought to be able to control more effectively through a Patent held in trust).

...

^1589. ‹http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/2004#ibm›

^1590.

Filed August 17, 2004, Application Number 60/602,290, Filing Recept OC00000001 37841 68 [this is a late version of the document filed, verify that it is the same]

^1591. Rudimentary implementations have existed for as long, and have been used in the building of the web site lexmercatoria aka. Ananse, the International Trade Law Project and the International Trade Law Monitor; and major parts of the implementation have been complete since 2002, ‹http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/diagram/sisu.chart›

^1592. ending up with a work environment based on debian/gnu/linux or unix, ruby, postgresql, vim, zsh, screen, ion etc. (plus broadband and a laptop with a high resolution monitor)

^1593. aka. Ananse, the International Trade Law Project and the International Trade Law Monitor.

^1594. and I had the benefit of a friend as attorney who worked pro bono

^1595. Filing a provisional patent application gave a year in which to decide whether to proceed with the patent process.

^1596. ‹http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/2004#ibm› shared sovenir email.

^1597. They had existing document management systems which he thought could benefit from the logic in the code demonstrated. In particular, they were interested in the document search possibilities, as their product was only able to return information on the documents which matched the search criterion.

SiSU when used with a database provides this at a "paragraph" (text or other object) level, and will return the documents matched together with the locations within each document of the match, or the documents matched together with the objects in which the match was found.

^1598. ‹http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html›

^1599. ‹http://www.fsf.org/›

^1600. ‹http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html›

SiSU - SiSU information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units,Ralph Amissah

Structured information, Serialized Units

SiSU - from less markup than the most elementary equivalent html, you can have more

Markup Syntax History

Technical Information

A Summary of notable events

A Chronological history of developments on SiSU

SiSU - SiSU information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units,
Ralph Amissah