United States Patent and Trademark Office is reviewing its policy on software patents and is asking for feedback. Groklaw reports that the USPTO will be hosting a pair of roundtable sessions in February, during which the public will have the ability to attend and put forth their viewpoints.

Last week, we put out an action item asking people to write to the USPTO, and explain to them why software should not be eligible for patents under their forthcoming post-Bilski guidance. To answer the call, you all sent in more than 450 letters, offering the USPTO all kinds of legal and practical reasons why they should stop issuing software patents.

In response to the controversy surrounding software patents, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has tightened up considerably on granting them, and they are now harder to get than any other type of patent (except for business methods). That’s the view of Mark A.

The U.S. is known for its patent friendliness. But a Supreme Court decision in 2008 overturned a patent application by Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw for a risk mitigation process. Now Red Hat is using the so-called Bilski case in support of software non-patentability.

The first patent applications we are invited to try to disqualify by looking for prior art have been posted on the Peer to Patent Project website. This is the project working to provide the USPTO with information about prior art during the application process. It's an experiment, and it's historic. It's never been tried before, to let the public provide input into the application process.

On June 15, the New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, in cooperation with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), launched the Peer-to-Patent community patent review pilot program.

This interview is part of a series following the Supreme Court's Bilski decision, which left the laws on what you can get a patent on largely as they are, after a four-justice minority failed to ban "business method" patents.

The pending US Supreme Court decision regarding In re Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw v. Kappos, in principle about patents on business methods and software, has lead to briefs being filed by numerous companies and associations.

When the Supreme Court heard the Bilski case earlier this year, it ruled that the specific business method patent at issue in the case was invalid and contended that the patentability of intangible methods should be reduced but not eliminated. The court declined to provide clarity on the scope of software patentability, however, which leaves a lot of important questions unanswered.