

IBM Watson to battle patent trolls - ukdm
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/108281-ibm-watson-to-battle-patent-trolls

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VanL
Unfortunately, this article is just speculation. IBM is processing and mining
the patent database, but everything else in the article - particularly the
parts about about finding prior art ("battling patent trolls") is the from the
ExtremeTech author, not IBM.

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zitterbewegung
Having IBM make a Watson instance that is dedicated to all patents would
require a significant investment by IBM. It seems like it takes a lot of time
and money to create specialized Watson instances. They have a specialized one
that recognizes pharmaceutical patents right now. In the long run it would
make sense to create something that fights patent trolls because the initial
investment might pay itself off by avoiding patent licencing or having people
find prior art etc...

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zeratul
IBM Watson team is focused on medical data mining now. Training IBM Watson
just for Jeopardy took over 7 years. They are struggling how to make Watson
learn faster. It's not the CPU or RAM limitations. There are a lot of custom
pipeline building that needs to happen. Medical data is usually behind
firewalls, password protected. Even medical books and articles are not easily
accessible. There is no place for side projects.

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D_Drake
Ah, the march of technology busily grinding the concept of intellectual
property into dust. Glorious. Imagine if every patent troll was greeted by
thousands of citations of previous use?

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VladRussian
how long before Watson discovers how profitable patent trolling can be for a
brain powerhouse like it [he can or soon will be able to generate "method and
apparatus for user interaction with interactive screen through rest interface"
faster than thousands SV programmers] and switches sides? :)

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virmundi
Why would IBM possibly want to have it's own AI fight IBM? Or will they put
special locks in that block IBM from being read?

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CountHackulus
IBM does happen to have quite a lot of patents to counter with. Having been in
business for 100+ years tends to do that.

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drcube
Patents don't last 100 years. Are IBM's 50,000 patents all current?

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jcizzle
The headline sounds interesting, but extremetech's mobile website is so awful
I can't read it... Breaks the back button on iOS sometimes and what's with the
forced pagination?

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mrsebastian
Hey -- yeah, the OnSwipe thing...

Turns out that lots of people like it, but some people really detest it. I
think we're fixing/changing it in the future, but I'm not sure of the exact
timeline.

Thanks for soldiering on in the time being :)

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tmurray
I wonder if they have a patent on using an automated natural language
processing system to fight patent trolls.

