Today, IBM introduced their own measures to reform the patent process. CNET has the story:

The policy, being announced today, includes standards like clearly identifying the corporate ownership of patents, to avoid filings that cloak authorship under the name of an individual or dummy company. It also asserts that so-called business methods alone--broad descriptions of ideas, without technical specifics--should not be patentable.

This is a huge step in the right direction. For more than a decade, IBM has lead each year in number of patents awarded. This is as big as the Hollywood cartels giving up on DRM. CNET quotes IBM's Samuel J. Palmisano:

"The larger picture here is that intellectual property is the crucial capital in a global knowledge economy.... If you need a dozen lawyers involved every time you want to do something, it's going to be a huge barrier. We need to make sure that intellectual property is not used as a barrier to growth in the future."

What Palmisano is describing is the innovation tax in action. If IBM is struggling under the weight of the innovation tax imagine what a smaller start up must face. The patent process is backwards and broken. Other tech companies have started to look at the problem, but IBM is taking action.