Patent Office to Explore Ways to Improve Quality of Software Patents

January 4th, 2013
Patents/IP

by: John R. Harris

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is apparently feeling public pressure to address the perception that it is issuing too many low quality patents on software-related inventions. A number of high-profile events such as the patent lawsuits between Apple and Samsung on smartphones, articles in business magazines and by law professors criticizing the patent system, and the emergence of so-called “patent trolls” have raised the public’s awareness about software patents.

The whole notion of granting patents on inventions that are primarily implemented in software is a complex legal and philosophical quagmire. Major criticisms of

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