With the Bilski case in the Supreme Court (see my previous news post Bilski v. Doll), there has been a lot of attention paid to what many believe to be a growing number of bogus patents being issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.  One organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the EFF), a donor-funded nonprofit organization, is fighting what it sees as bogus patents head on.  One of the EFF’s initiatives is the Patent Busting Project, which identifies what it believes to be particularly problematic invalid patents that harm innovators, entrepreneurs and small businesses.  The Patent Busting Project first targets what it believes to be the worst offending patents, then documents the prior art to demonstrate the invalidity of the identified patents, chronicles the harm to the public and attacks the patents by filing for reexamination with the USPTO.

The Patent Busting Project’s latest target is U.S. Patent No. 6,243,373, a patent directed to a method and apparatus for implementing a computer network/internet telephone system, a patent viewed by the Patent Busting Project as being a threat to legitimate innovation in the field of voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP).  The complete reexamination request can be found here.

In an EFF press release on October 14, 2009, the Legal Director Cindy Cohn said, “bogus patents like this one highlight the problems with our current patent system.  Patenting technology that is an obvious combination of well understood technological conventions opens the door to lawsuits against legitimate innovators who are creating new VoIP products in good faith.”

The EFF, and particularly the Patent Busting Project, have caught my attention and I will be following their efforts as the do what they believe is in the best interest of technology and innovation.

Tags: patent busting project, patent law, uspto