Further research

The IPR-based software life cycle already raises many fundamental questions that are not easy to answer:

• Is it possible to use these extended software life cycles in such a way that they comply with the major patenting systems world wide?
• How can the software engineering knowledge that is hidden in the patent data bases made accessible for software engineers?
• Is it possible to a give an operational definition of a patent infringement that can be used by software engineers?
• For each of the phases of the software life cycle (requirements engineering, design, implementation, testing and maintenance) the following questions should be answered:
  • How is knowledge in this phase represented?
  • Where can prior art for this phase be found?
  • How can patent infringements in this phase be identified?
  • How can patent infringements in this phase be resolved?
  We expect that the answers to these questions will widely differ for each phase.
• What are the technical implications for software development when using these extended software life cycles?
• What are the economic implications of the extended software life cycles?

Taking software patents seriously means designing patenting systems and studying their implications for open source software as well as for open standards. We believe that studying the following research questions can contribute to a revision of the patent system and may even lead to a form of software patents that behave as intended: disseminate the knowledge about inventions and give rewards to true inventors. We propose therefore to study the following research questions, partly in the context of the current project:

• Knowledge Extraction from Current Patent Databases: how can the software engineering knowledge that is hidden in the current patent databases be unlocked and be made available to the software engineering community? This will not be studied in the current project.

• Prior Art: how can knowledge about prior art in the domain of software engineering be described and formalized in such a way that trivial patents can be avoided?

• New Patent Systems: Design a patent system with the following properties: (a) Patent applications are written as a formal description of the claimed inventions; (b) Applications can be compared automatically with the patent database; (c) Patents enable the automatic detection of infringements.

We expect as results from studying these questions:

• An approach for knowledge mining in patent databases.
• An approach to formal representation of software engineering knowledge.
• Techniques for the formal description of patents.
• Ideas for the design of new patent systems.
• Insights in the implications of software patents for open source software and open standards.