Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 […]

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 […]