Patents
Microsoft introduces innovative patent tracker
A patent-tracking tool launched by Microsoft last week is the latest effort by a large technology company to combat aggressive litigation tactics that have been holding up innovation and hurting economic growth, experts said.
Microsoft's Patent Tracker, introduced March 28, provides a list of all the patents owned by Microsoft and allows users to search by patent number, title or assignee of record.
If other companies follow suit with patent trackers, it should become harder for non-practicing entities, or businesses that buy patents simply to litigate them for financial gain, said Julie Samuels, an intellectual property specialist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for digital rights.
That's because such patent databases would clearly establish ownership, said Samuels. Currently, patent developers have no sure way of knowing who owns which patents, or which patents even exist, she said.
With an industrywide patent-tracking system, patent developers also could focus on innovation rather than litigation, Colleen Chien, an assistant professor of law at Santa Clara University, wrote in a letter in January to the U.S. Patent and Trade Office.
A copy of the letter was provided to Reuters by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Chien did not return a request for comment.
The volume of patent applications has mushroomed in recent years. So far on 2013 the patent office has received about 10,000 utility patent applications per week, according to an agency spokesman.
Although Microsoft is one of the few companies that have introduced a patent tracker, the company said it hopes to start a trend prompting competitors and other tech firms to do the same. Such a development would help spur innovation and create jobs, said Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel and executive vice president of legal and corporate affairs.
The tracker is just one example of efforts being made by large technology companies to curb litigation abuse by non-practicing entities.
Twitter and Google both recently introduced policies aimed at countering patent litigation, albeit in different forms. Twitter announced its Innovator's Patent Agreement last year, which states the company will only litigate the patents of its engineers if Twitter is sued first.
Google recently pledged not to sue users or developers of open source software to help preserve recent developments in cloud computing and mobile Web devices.
Neither company returned a request for comment.
The push comes just a year after the passing of the America Invents Act, a significant reform to the American patent system, and amid ongoing efforts to fix flaws in the patent system.
In an online question-and-answer session on GooglePlus in early February, President Barack Obama said the reforms of the America Invents Act "only went halfway to where we need to go" and that companies are beginning to come up with their own solutions to help the broken system. On March 14, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on abusive patent litigation.
"The courts and Congress haven't fixed the problem, so companies are left to find their own solutions," said Samuels, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
(Published by Thomson Reuters News & Insight – April 2, 2013)