The company was granted 3,248 patents in 2004, according to figures from the US Patent and Trademark Office, the twelfth consecutive year that it has been the top US patent earner, but has pledged to use a proportion of the patents to help the open source community.
Our pledge today is the beginning of a new era in how IBM will manage intellectual property to benefit our partners and clients, said IBM senior vice president of technology and intellectual property, John Kelly. Unlike the preceding industrial economy, the innovation economy requires that intellectual property be deployed for more than just providing the owner with freedom of action and income generation.
The company has pledged open access to 500 US patents and their global equivalents to any individual, community, or company working on or using software covered by an Open Source Initiative license.
Patents offered cover technologies including operating system and database interoperability, user interface, language processing, and file-export protocols. IBM said it will not assert the patents against open source software users or developers, other than to protect users and developers from patent action served against them by a third party.
IBM’s patent pledge follows a verbal commitment made in August 2004 not to assert any of its patents against the Linux kernel, and a vow by Novell Inc in October 2004 to use its patent portfolio to protect open source from third-party patent challenges.
IBM added that it hoped its action would form the basis of what it called a patent commons that could be used as a platform for innovation in the open source industry. This is not a one-time event, said Kelly. We will increasingly use patents to encourage and protect global innovation and interoperability through open standards and we encourage others to do so as well.
The pledge has not been welcomed by everyone, however. Florian Mueller, campaign manager of NoSoftwarePatents.com, described it as diversionary given IBM’s support of the controversial proposed directive to alter technology patent laws in Europe.
The debate surrounding the proposed changes has meanwhile taken another twist as 61 Members of the European Parliament have introduced a motion asking the European Commission to go back to the drawing board on the directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions.
The directive, which has been in development for more than two years, is designed to standardize technology patent laws across the European Union, but contains a loophole that according to critics would allow widespread software patents.
The directive was due to be approved by the European Council at the end of 2004 but was delayed after Wlodzimierz Marcinski, Poland’s undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Science and Information Technology, argued that more time was need for discussion of its implications for software patents.
The group of 61 MEPs covers 13 different countries and four political groups, and has called on the European Commission to refer its proposed directive to the European Parliament again, effectively restarting the political process.
The group has invoked rule 55 of the European Parliament’s Rules of Procedure to file the motion based on the fact that there has been a change in circumstances thanks to recent elections and the enlargement of the European Union.
The European Parliament, which will have to agree the terms of the directive with the EU Council if it is to become law, passed a variety of amendments in September 2003 that sought to rectify its apparent failings.
In May 2004, however, the EU Council announced that a political agreement on a third version of the proposal, one that removed large chunks of the amendments, had been reached, with a majority of EU Council members informally approving the proposal.
The removal of those amendments caused consternation among opponents who have claimed that the proposal in its current form will effectively legalize software patents in Europe.
