How to find a Software Patent?

Many software patents have become known by simply reading the patents in the patent databases. This is, however, a Gargantuan task and a more systematic and automatic method is needed when performing large scale legal and economic studies. Usually, software patents are identified as those patents that satisfy a simple query on the title and the specification of the patent itself. Typically, the query includes words like “software”, “computer”, and “program” but excludes words like “chip”, “semiconductor” and some others. How does a software engineering judge the software content of patents selected via this method? In order to answer this question we studied a random sample of such “software patents” and come to the conclusion that only a small minority of them is really describing a software-related invention. 1 Background As part of a three year European Commission (EC) study1 on the effects of software patents on innovation we are involved in a multi-disciplinary effort to understand the effects of software patents. These effects are studied from legal, economical, and computer science perspectives. In previous papers we have studied trivial patents [1] and software inventions [2]. In the present paper we discuss the quality of automatic searches for software patents. In a much-cited study by Bessen and Hunt [3] software patents are selected by the following query: ((‘‘software’’ in specification) OR (‘‘computer’’ AND ‘‘program’’ in specification)) AND NOT (‘‘chip’’ OR ‘‘semiconductor’’ OR ‘‘bus’’ OR ‘‘circuit’’ OR ‘‘circuitry’’ in title) AND NOT (‘‘antigen’’ OR ‘‘antigenic’’ OR ‘‘chromatography’’ in specification) Since then, various refinements to this selection procedure have been proposed and many economic studies have been and are being based on comparable search methods. Here we want to address the question: are the patents selected via such methods describing software-related inventions? 1Study of the effects of allowing patent claims for computer-implemented inventions, a joint study by MERIT (University of Maastricht, Netherlands), Centre of Intellectual Property Law CIER (University of Utrecht, Netherlands), Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Telecommunication Engineering School at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Spain and Centre for Research on Innovation and Internationalization (CESPRI) at Bocconi University, Milan, Italy.