IBM to Publish its Patent Applications

In an effort to clarify some of the rough edges that have separated IBM's corporate policy as an open-source advocate, and its policy towards enforcing patents on its own intellectual property, the company Tuesday announced a change to its policy on applying for and enforcing patents on its intellectual property.

Most importantly, the company said it intends to reduce the number of patents it applies for in the field of business methods and will make the content of its patent applications public.

"IBM believes that widespread adoption of a more formal code of conduct around patents could ease the burden on legal and government administrative systems," said a company statement yesterday. "Those systems now deal with growing numbers of questionable patent applications and patent lawsuits."

The company said it will now publish its patent filings online, and encourage others to do the same. Patent applications are already a matter of public record, though arguably, the US Patent and Trademark Office may not always get around to publishing applications online in an immediate fashion - since it deals with thousands of applications at any one time.

Part of the recent debate over whether software should be patentable centers around the argument by open-source advocates and others that software methods are discoveries of ways to work, rather than inventions, and are thus not subject to patent. For IBM to maintain the support it has already received among the open-source community, it needed to take a stand, and not have that stand appear to be situated too close to the proverbial fence.

"Pure business methods without technical merit should not be patentable," IBM's new policy now reads. "All inventions with technical merit should be patentable, provided they meet all of the requirements of patentability. Applicants should seek to publish, not patent, their pure business method innovations if they wish to prevent others from patenting similar business methods."

To that end, IBM is apparently looking to further develop a kind of community methodology marketplace, based in part on its "Intellectual Property Marketplace Wiki" project launched last May.

In a document that emerged from that effort in June, IBM senior vice president John E. Kelly, III, stated that one of the suggestions emerging from this Wiki project was "a new media Web 2.0 tool that enables documents to be collaboratively written through a common Web site - to address the intellectual property marketplace."

Making its patents open to community review may be the latest in a series of steps by IBM to cast itself as a company responsible to its community, rather than single-mindedly looking out after its own interests. At the same time, the company is clearly taking a stand on the fact that patents remain useful tools for establishing intellectual property rights, as long as it is clear to the general public whose rights are being protected.