Google’s PageRank and other Patents are About to Expire?

Aug

2008

Google’s PageRank and other Patents are About to Expire?

Author: john | Posted in: Search Industry News

While researching for the blog on PageRank I was about to publish in place of this one, I landed on Patently-O, a patent law blog that had this post: The Death of Google’s Patents?

I’ve read through it a couple of times and being a Google fan, I find myself in a state of fix!! What I understand from all the legaleses they have on that page is that, The US Patent and Trademark Office is in the process to invalidate not just Google’s Patents but all patents in the software industry and many other cutting-edge fields related to IT and software like bioinformatics as well! This will hit the patent on celebrity intellectual properties like Google’s PageRank along with hundreds of other software patents held by other software companies. The loss in revenue generated by this line of patents for the nation’s depleting reserves is still not in the picture.

As a common man, I am trying hard to understand the logic behind the new development and the opinion of the office, process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they “result in a physical transformation of an article” or are “tied to a particular machine.” If common sense prevails at the PTO someone will realize that the new rule would lead to a massive confusion among inventors and businessmen on the role of PTO as their protectors.

Of all the software patents that will go down, I believe Google PageRank will be the last most of us would like to see take a fall. It enjoys an entirely different level of popularity and nurtures more than one multi-billion dollar industry. The financial implications not just in the US, but worldwide when PageRank technology will not remain patented are beyond calculations.

It would be interesting to know what you all think about this development.

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Google’s PageRank and other Patents are About to Expire?