05/04/2009 10:06:07 AM EST

"Much of the blame lies squarely with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, so the news in this issue (“Fixing the software patent process,” page 1) that the USPTO is tightening up its patent process is welcome indeed." Speak with any patent attorney and he'll tell you otherwise. The patent issue rate is at an all time low many fields. Poor management at the PTO has exacerbated the problem. Rather than encourage innovation they are discouraging it. We can innovate our way out of these troubling economic times the banking and oil robber barons have gotten us into, but we need a competent and independent PTO who is not a rubber stamp for policy instituted by large multinationals throwing around slush fund money. patent reform is a fraud on America... please see http://truereform.piausa.org/ for a different/opposing view on patent reform

staff

05/04/2009 11:05:36 AM EST

>>> " the sheer number of patents granted for software inventions each year" Computers, software, and the Internet are clearly the future in progress - just as the steam engine, automobile, and jet engine was in decades/centuries past. So one would expect the bulk of investment in innovation occur here at the forefront. >>> "We can all rattle off the names of the database leaders, starting with the big three: IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, and continuing to players like Ingres, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sybase and many others" The products by those companies were not completely invented in-house. Non-trivial amounts of the technology in those products were brought in from external innovations - including acquiring small companies. Clearly IBM, Microsoft and Oracle are continually acquiring companies. If there products are better it is partly due to outside innovators - often smaller then they themselves.

sg