Author Archives: Andrew Schulman

I’ve been looking into the possible use of the US National Software Reference Library (NSRL), http://www.nsrl.nist.gov, maintained by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), as a library of software prior art. Such a library would be useful both to the US Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) and to patent litigators. The original purpose […]

Reading the article, it may not seem to have anything to do with IP litigation, but this National Software Reference Library appears to potentially be an important basis for a prior-art software library (that is, not a collection of publications about software, but of text extracted from the software itself, for use as prior art). […]

One important use is as a source of reliably-dated prior art. The authors discuss admissibility and authentication issues. Two additional points not made in the article: Technical experts may reasonably rely on dated web pages from archive.org. In addition to web pages, the Wayback Machine also contains a substantial amount of software with datestamps — […]