Implications for education

Patent law requires that a patent should be non-obvious to a ``person of ordinary skill in the art''. Note that this skill regards a technical art and that the person is not expected to have any legal knowledge or ability to interpret the legal meaning of a software patent. As already observed by Ullman [33], it is unclear what the technical background of such a person should be: ranging from a self-educated programmer, via a bachelor or master in computer science or software engineering, to a professional researcher in these areas. If we consider the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK [32]) as approved by IEEE, we are pretty sure that a person with that technical knowledge is unable to read or interpret software patents let alone determine potential infringements. The patent-aware software engineering life cycle (Section 3) also requires an increased level of awareness of software patents among software engineers as well as the skills to turn this awareness into deeds.

It is clear that the current education of software engineers and the future requirements imposed by a patenting system including software patents will be dramatic. As far as we aware, there is no curriculum worldwide that is prepared for this. Governments should invest in the development of such curricula and in major retraining of professional software engineers.