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Yesterday, the New York Times broke a story that suggested that IBM would put its entire patent portfolio on line, would post all of its patent applications as well, and finally, would call for an end to all "business method" patents. The only problem is, none of those things turned out to be true.
The problem began with an ambiguous press release that was apparently made available to the New York Times' Steve Lohr in advance of its release. Lohr either wrote his article entirely from the press release, or didn't ask IBM the right questions to capture the true scope of IBM's intentions. In fact, IBM is only advocating tightening up the standard for granting business method patents, is not posting its patent portfolio on line, and is only continuing to submit a limited number of software patent applications to a previously announced Patent and Trademark Office pilot program. What it is doing still amounts to real progress, but the stories that are still being posted to mainstream news sites are still echoing the original, inflated story. Unfortunately, this is all too common in the modern world of Internet journalism, where speed and frequency of posting are increasingly crowding out interviews and research in favor of simply passing along information based entirely on someone else's story.
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