Net Overloads US Patent Agency

The US Patent and Trademark Office can't hire people fast enough to keep up with skyrocketing demand for Internet patents, let alone stay current with the technology. By Jennifer Sullivan.

The latest effort to protect an Internet standard from an entrepreneur goes to the heart of what some view as a growing problem with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Critics fear the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) -- despite its key role in the information age -- just doesn't get the Internet.

The World Wide Web Consortium's grassroots effort to protect an open Internet standard from a private patent challenge is just the latest example of how sweeping patent awards are affecting Net technologies.

It is creating some bitter battles.

"Lately there have been an awful lot of patents that possibly interfere" with each other, said Jason Catlett, CEO of Junkbusters and a corporate consultant on privacy issues.

"In online advertising, there [have been] so many patents in the past few months it's difficult to tell which 17 patents the average patent is infringing on," Catlett said.

The trouble harks back to 1993, when Encyclopaedia Britannica's patent number US05241671, on multimedia CD-ROMs with hyperlinked text, generated an outcry in the nascent new-media industry. The patent office reexamined the patent and threw it out.

More recently, the PTO has awarded patents for actual Internet business models.

Priceline.com is defending a patent awarded for its "name-your-price" business method. Sightsound.com is fending off an effort by N2K to take down its patent on the concept of selling music downloads over the Net. And Netword recently lost a court battle over a patent covering the use of keywords to represent Web addresses.

Such cases have renewed criticism of the PTO among lawyers and Net activists for having granted the likes of patent number US05491779 -- a "three-dimensional presentation of multiple data sets in unitary format with pie charts." The document grants ownership of the 3-D pie chart.

"You need to be very careful how you interpret a patent," said Todd Dickinson, acting commissioner at the patent office.

Dickinson said that most patents criticized as being too broad actually have a very narrowly defined scope. The PTO hasn't patented "the wheel," for example, but it has patented a bicycle racing wheel's hub and spoke configuration.

"We probably patent 100 [bicycle wheels] a year," Dickinson said.

That argument doesn't fly among patent lawyers.

"Why not apply for a patent for the method of invalidating patents?" said Michael Barclay, attorney at Silicon Valley law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati. "You can patent anything now."