The Public Patent Foundation (“PUBPAT”) has moved “in-house” at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Public Patent is one of only 2 or 3 public interest organizations that actively fight against abusive patents.  Cardozo Law is doing a great service helping PubPat with in house support.  This shows a great committement to pubilc interest on Cardozo’s part.  I look forward to seeing the work the PubPat and Cardozo can do together.

Here are the top three organizations that are fighting bad patents. Take Action! More on the patents coming tomorrow as we hear oral arguments for in re Bilski.

An EFF Initiative To Protect Innovation and Free Expression

Tired of bogus software patents? So are we! To combat these annoying and often dangerous legal weapons, EFF has launched the Patent Busting Project to take down some of worst offenders.

We need your help! Take a look at the Top Ten Most Wanted culprits on our list, and let us know if you have any leads on technology that predates them (called “prior art”) that we can use to challenge their validity. Visit the patent busting project to take action.

FSF – End Software Patents

Software innovation happens without government intervention. Virtually all of the technologies you use now were developed before software was widely viewed as patentable. The Web, email, your word processor and spreadsheet program, instant messaging, or even more technical features like the psychoacoustic encoding and Huffman compression underlying the MP3 standard—all of it was originally developed by enthusiastic programmers, many of whom have formed successful business around such software, none of whom asked the government for a monopoly. So if software authors have a proven track-record of innovation without patents, why force them to use patents? What is the gain from billions of dollars in patent litigation?

PUBPAT is a not-for-profit legal services organization that represents the public interest against the harms caused by errors in the patent system, particularly the harms caused by undeserved patents and unsound patent policy. PUBPAT provides the general public and specific persons or entities otherwise deprived of access to the system governing patents with representation, advocacy and education. PUBPAT accomplishes its mission through two core activities.

First, PUBPAT protects the public domain from being recaptured in new patents. PUBPAT’s primary tool for protecting the public domain is filing requests for re-examination with the PTO. A request for re-examination is the formal administrative mechanism used to ask the PTO to revoke an issued patent on the grounds that the idea it claims is actually not new, but is instead nothing more than
a reformulation of information that was already in the public domain.

Second, PUBPAT advocates for improvements to the patent system and educates the public about the esoteric issues implicated by patents, specifically how they impact everyday life. PUBPAT advocates on behalf of sound patent policy before the courts, Congress, in the PTO and through participation in relevant conferences, while PUBPAT educates the public though presentations, one-on-one discussions and publications.

Freedom for IP will be at LinuxFest Northwest 2008. We will be staffing an education vendor table and talking about the need to fight Software and Method Patents. If you are attending stop by and talk to us.

Our primary reasons for attending are two fold:

First to educate and reach out to people on patent based issues that threaten the open sourse community, while also recruiting grass roots activist to help change the landscape of patents.

Second to promote other orginizations that are actively involved in the patent fight. For exapample:

Public Patent Foundation
EFF’s Patent Busting

NYU and PTO’s Peer to Patent

FSF End Software Patents campaign

Totem Graphic by Irvin Dorfman