CNET News.com: IBM taps open source to improve patent quality CNET News.com: IBM taps open source to improve patent quality

IBM, for the 13th year in a row, is #1 is issued patents for the year. Actually, their total of 2,900 seems a bit down from previous years - when I was at Motorola, we did almost half of that. Not surprisingly though, given the amount of money that they spend on patents, they are trying to clean them up a bit, in particular, software patents, and are working with Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), an industry consortium that launched a "patent commons" for open-source communities in November 2005.

And this may have some impact. Historically, the USPTO didn't allow software patents based on some bizarre theory that software was like laws of nature, and thus, unpatenable. Then, the Federal Courf that oversees them, the CAFC, overruled them, and forced the agency to start issuing patents on software. However, during the decades that they had their head in the sand on this subject, they weren't collecting prior art, most notably patents (esp. since they thought software was unpatentable). The result has been that they haven't done that good of a job examining software patents for novelty and nonobviousness. And a good part of that problem is not knowing the prior art, as they do in most other art areas. The IBM initiative may help here.