Grab your guns! Hunting season is now open on software patents!

[app103]

Hunting season is now open on software patents, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Stack Exchange and Google are teaming up to make it easy for geeks to shoot down overbroad and ridiculous patents.

Thanks to a change in patent law that went into effect this month, third parties who think a patent application is flimsy or invalid due to previous art or obviousness can now file evidence and comments to the USPTO, starting Thursday morning. Previously, it was illegal for the USPTO to take outside parties comments into account when evaluating a patent application.

Making the process even easier, Stack Exchange, the popular Q&A site for coders, has teamed up with the Patent Office and Google to crowdsource analysis of patents before they are issued.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/patent-busting-crowdsourced/

[f0dder]

* f0dder crosses fingers.

This might end up not helping anything (greedy lobbying lawyer scum!), or it might actually be just what we need. Pretty cool to throw StackExchange into the mix!

[iphigenie]

can't imagine any new sofware patent making it through this - anything not granted is toast. Good.

not sure this applies to already granted patents though, there we are probably stuck with the legal system