3pointD.com

Is the patent system broken? According to Robert Barr of UC Berkeley, “The system’s not only broken, it’s a disaster.” While the panel that discussed the issue at Supernova today was only tangentially related to the issues that came up recently here on 3pointD, it did contain some interesting bits of news. The main problem under discussion was the great length of time it takes to get a patent examined at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. There are currently up to a million patent applications pending, according to Beth Noveck of the New York Law School (who runs that institution’s Democracy Island project in the virtual world of Second Life). Her solution? Create a peer-review system that leverages the power of the Web. Apparently, IBM and Microsoft have already agreed to have patents reviews through the system, Noveck said, and many other companies are ready to come on board. (more…)

Glitchy sends along a link to an interesting technology I hadn’t heard of before: 3D shape search. Apparently, a company called UGS Corp. has just bought a 3D shape search technology from German IT services firm software design & managment. UGS’s new Geolus Search product (formerly geolus SHAPE) “allows manufacturers to quickly locate 3D models of digitally defined parts from large heterogeneous data sources on the basis of geometric similarity,” according to a press release. (more…)