The patent life cycle

Figure 1: The patent life cycle: from filing to expiration

It is important to describe the phases of the patenting process in such a manner that they become recognizable for the software engineer. We conjecture that the Patent Life Cycle shown in Figure 1 is a fair representation of this process. It consists of the following phases:

• An applicant applies for a patent.
• The applicant can decide to withdraw the application.
• The Patent Office can either grant or reject the application.
• The applicant can appeal against this decision and a reject decision may be changed into a grant decision.
• The applicant of a granted patent applicant becomes the holder of the patent.
• A granted patent may be challenged by another party. This may lead to revocation of the patent.
• The patent holder may act on infringement of its patent.
• The patent holder may license its patent to another party.
• The patent holder may extend its patent periodically.
• The patent expires after a maximal duration.

It is open for debate whether this abstraction of the patenting process can be used in the EU as well as in the US and Japan. However, since software developers have to be aware of potential patent infringements, independent of the source of the patent, such an abstraction of the patenting process is essential. This is relevant for developers of both commercial software and open source software.

The IsNot patent to be discussed later on in Section 4 is in the application phase, for all other patents mentioned in this paper we have explicitly indicated their status.

Figure 2: The software life cycle

Figure 3: The defensive patent-aware software life cycle

Figure 4: The offensive patent-based software life cycle

Figure 5: Considering all options: the IPR-based software life cycle