Stanford, CA (February 12, 2013) – Today, Application Developers Alliance President Jon Potter made recommendations to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) for improving the software patent system. Potter spoke at the PTO Software Patent Roundtable held in Silicon Valley.
“When we started the App Developers Alliance, many early members told us there shouldn’t be any software patents. They said the Patent Act did not authorize software patents; that software didn’t need patent protection at all since it is completely protected by copyright; and that developers are being held hostage by trolls who wield poor-quality patents like machetes. When the people who are supposed to benefit from software patents are saying they don’t want them, then something is amiss,” Potter said.
Potter asked the PTO to focus on two goals:
· Ensuring that the Patent Office is not awarding monopolies for mere ideas, rather than inventions,
· And ensuring that claims are described clearly and precisely and do not exceed the boundaries of the carefully and precisely described invention.
The full comments, including specific recommendations on achieving those goals, are available here.
About the Application Developers Alliance
The Application Developers Alliance is an industry association dedicated to meeting the unique needs of application developers as creators, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Alliance members include more than 20,000 individual application developers and more than 100 companies, investors, and stakeholders in the apps ecosystem.
