Author Archives: Andrew Schulman

An earlier post notes some examples of “deep indexing” of the textual contents of commercial software products: Such deep indexing of binary code files has been done in some limited areas, such as the superb PDP-10 software archive at http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/ in which files have been extracted from tape images, each file given its own web […]

The White House recently announced the US PTO’s launch of “Ask Patents” (a forum at the “Stack Exchange”) as a crowdsourcing platform to identify prior art. Right now, the forum seems to mostly have general questions and answers. There are several interesting Q&As, in which patent examiners explain that they do not consider software itself […]

The previous post discussed the US government’s National Software Reference Library (NSRL), a collection of 15,000 commercial products, currently indexed by files (hash, filename.ext) comprising each product. The post posed the question whether the NSRL could be used as the basis for a library of software prior art, usable by examiners at the US Patent […]