Stanford CIS

CFP 2004, Bad Patents

By Stanford Center for Internet and Society on

Yesterday I got to hang out at the Computers, Freedom, & Privacy conference at the posh Claremont Resort and Spa in Berkeley. There were some great panels, including the ones I went to on open source software and P2P. I was also able to chat with different people about the work they're doing. One interesting new project is the Patent Busting project Jason Schultz has launched at EFF. The idea is to identify and expose bad patents and, in the most egregious cases, to file for re-examination by the PTO.  Dan Ravicher also recently founded the Public Patent Foundation to achieve similar goals. Hopefully, projects like these will help to make patents as much of a public interest issue as copyright law has become in recent years.

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