Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Thursday 31/8/2006

This is more like it. In response to the US patent system's cries for help as it descends into madness and beyond, people are doing it for themselves. And they're doing it with a wiki.

The idea's simple. Put each patent into the wiki and attach useful extras such as a layman's translation of what it means, what a reasonable licence might cost and a star rating for how good the patent actually is. There's also a chance to point out prior art or other issues that may affect the patent's validity — the sort of things that frequently crop up with some of the more adventurous attempts to fence off bits of software.

But it's a wiki — anyone can edit it, anyone can add new stuff or delete it. Anarchy — or peer review? Wikipedia has demonstrated most effectively the good and bad sides to this approach: yes, information can be dubious, subjectivity can be hard to winkle out and some contributors behave like Siamese fighting fish in a hall of mirrors. But the quality of the information can be surprisingly high, especially when it can be anchored in something unarguable. The patent wiki will have the backbone of the patents themselves, which may be of debatable utility but undoubtedly exist, and it will act as a natural repository for ancillary information about law, how to decode patents, what are valid and invalid assumptions, and so on.

I'm looking forward to this. Something similar has happened in Groklaw, which has been a superb education in US company law, and has in no small part taken the sting out of the endless SCO nonsense. (It's quite fun at the moment, as SCO is having to explain the "mountains of evidence" and "millions of lines of code" that were discovered by MIT mathematicians as taken from Unix and put into Linux. The code, the evidence and the mathematicians have all mysteriously vanished in the time between SCO spouting off about them and the case finally getting through the early stages at court. Of course, Groklaw has exhaustively documented the whole business, putting each new SCO statement into immediate, harsh release).

If the WikiPatents community — and the other similar endeavours at various states of readiness — prove to have one tenth that amount of reality-inducing power, my job as a reporter of intellectual property issues will be a hundred times easier. Those who rely on the fog of law and the chilling effect of doubt, asymmetric resources and expensive lawyers, may find their job concomitantly harder.

Good.