Open source solution provider Red Hat announced its strong commitment to patent reform to remove barriers to innovation at the Red Hat Summit yesterday.
Mark Webbink, Deputy General Counsel at Red Hat, addressed the audience articulating a three-part intellectual property strategy aimed at ensuring an open right to innovate.
In recent months Red Hat has engaged in efforts to reform government public policy on patents in Europe and in the United States. Webbink talked specifically of Red Hat’s engagement with the European Parliament to amend the Computer-Implemented Inventions directive. In the United States Red Hat has called for reform of the patent system to hold patent applications to a higher standard of scrutiny that ensures better patent quality, and to expand the rights of third parties to challenge questionable patent applications and issued patents.
The third arm of Red Hat’s strategy is to work to protect open source by creating a Software Patent Commons. Much like the Creative Commons which encourages collaboration by wide sharing of rights under copyright, a Software Patent Commons would enable a future of free collaboration and thought sharing among software technologists with reduced concern over patents.
“Patents are not equal to innovation,” stated Webbink. “More often, innovation occurs despite patents. What we observe today in the software industry is the use of patents to maintain marketshare, even where that marketshare has been obtained by anticompetitive means. We need to move away from a system of software patents compromised by trivial, incremental enhancements that block innovation, to a system that is aimed at rewarding substantial innovation.”
Chris is a staff writer for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest ebusiness news.
