Talk:Student Projects:IT Patents And Copyrights

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The One-Pager

So here are the requirements for the one-pager:

Each team must provide a one-page project description, which will be worth 10% of the project grade: team members, topic, sub-topics, sources, team organization, etc.

I would suggest the outline I posted for topics and sub-topics. One of the points in lecture on Thursday made me think that it would possibly be interesting to explore the "fringe" of patentable/copyrightable ideas: interfaces and file formats.

For sources: LCA at Microsoft for position papers, www.findlaw.com (Do we have access to West Law?) for case law, government web sites for policies and statutes, our Federal Congressmen (and -women) would also be able to point us to position papers and lobbyists, I would expect. Also, there is that email Prof. Lazowska just sent us about the 9 no-no's.

I don't have any strong preferences, but I think I would like to contact our Congresspeople for info.

The one page sumary

Patents, Copyright, and Software – Square Pegs for a Round Hole?

o Anoop Gupta, Microsoft,anoopg@cs.washington.edu

o Dave Kong, Microsoft, davekong, davekong@cs.washington.edu

o Jason Chalecki, Microsoft, chalecki@u.washington.edu

o Jerry Lin, Microsoft, jerrylin@cs.washington.edu

o John Li, Microsoft, johnli@cs.washington.edu

We are going to tackle the problem of what is wrong with the current patent and copyright system when it is applied to the software industry and what we might do in order to fix or improve the system. We are going to start out with an overview of the history of patents to give some background on where we came from and how they were applied in other industries. At this point we will start to work on the evolution of patents and copyright and go thru their application to the software industry. This will give a good background of what the problems we’ve already seen are and we can then go thru problems that we may see in the future. We will describe the case law and legislation that has come out of this as well. (Anoop, 4-8 pages)

At this point we will make a comparison of software IP to IP in other industries to see what is different about the software industry. This will help us show why patents and copyright doesn’t work as well with software. We will then go thru the way IP is treated by different countries and regions around the world. We can go thru what solutions these governments have come up with and what has worked and what hasn’t. We can also go thru how these different policies have interacted together, the problems they have caused, and the problems that still remain unresolved. We will go thru areas such as Asia/Japan, Europe, India, Australia, Latin America, and China. (Dave, 4-8 pages)

Next we will go thru what are the main likes and dislikes of the current system. We will go in the philosophical and theoretical ideals and what problems exist even there, and then we will go thru the practical problems that we’ve seen. Next we will see what attempts there have been to change the current system have been undertaken. There is quite a bit here on current policy and we could even start looking at bills that have been proposed in congress, but haven’t been enacted. We will go into what complaints there were with each of these attempts and why they failed. In many cases we expect that the change failed because of political pressure, but there will also be many other cases where there are more basic complaints about the change. (Jason, 4-8 pages)

After looking at all these changes, different systems in place, and attempts to change the current system, we will make our own recommendation of the idea that we want. We will have to go thru what the idea should actually look like and why. What are the fundamental rights for the producers and the consumers in this system of ours? What kinds of conflicts do we see, and there will be conflicts because no system is perfect. Also we will describe the compromises that we have made in our system, and why we thought that those were the correct decisions to make. Finally we will start our conclusion. Here we will highlight the next steps that need to be taken and do a quick summary of what we went over in the rest of the paper. I expect the summary to look a lot like this one page doc. (Jerry and Jon, 5-10 pages and probably the harder ones to write)

assignments

So it sounds like everyone is okay with the areas assigned to them. I am going to do some more detailed outlining of my area over the next week, and I think it would work well to go thru this in stages like that so the paper flows from section to section. We can also revise areas as we go along this way, which should make it less work since we won't have to produce something close to a final product until we get farther along and are sure about the direction we are taking.

limiting the scope of our paper a little

So I've been doing some research and getting a pretty good outline of what I am going to write together. I actually started writing some of it already. While I was looking into our topic, I found that our topic is a little too broad. I think we should just concentrate on the patent side of things and perhaps not include the comparison to other countries in our paper. Anyone else want to comment?

Going thru part of the history of patents (haven't written the software impact stuff) I have about two pages single spaced. I figure that it will be about 3.5 if I double spaced it because of quotes.

Places w/ information

Here are the places I found information. I have primarily been using www.researchoninnovation.org.

Also, I think Anoop mentioned he found stuff at BitLaw.

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