[BioC] : Patent issues of classification algorithms

Francois Pepin fpepin at cs.mcgill.ca
Tue Dec 15 20:00:41 CET 2009


Dear Qinghua,

I don't think you should concern yourself too much with patents on most 
classification methods.

Yes, there might be lots of SVM patents in a biomedical field, but the 
basic method for SVM is not patented and the same is true for almost all 
other methods.

Unless something malicious was going on, the license field should tell 
you if there is anything you should worry about. For example, the 
siggenes packages says that a paid license is needed for non-academic users.

But as I said, I don't think any of the basic classification methods in 
R (including in e0171) are patented and I would not worry about it in a 
publication.

If you were planning on commercializing a test, it could be worth 
checking more heavily about it.  I would expect those patents are of the 
sort, using genes X,Y,Z with this algorithm with these parameters to 
solve this problem. Just using the same algorithm would probably not be 
covered by those patents. Still, if there is money at stake, you would 
be better off contacting someone specialized in the field.

Francois

On 12/14/2009 10:49 PM, qinghua xu wrote:
> Dear Sean,
>
> Thanks a lot for your prompt reply!
>
> I think the main concern is not the citation issue. That should be OK. I have rapidly checked the "GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE" under which R packages are released. If I understand correctly, it is more about COPYING, DISTRIBUTION and MODIFICATION program itself, rather than the outputs from using program.
>
> Take the famous package (e0171) as an example. Without doubt, it is under the licence GPL-2, however, I also find massive patents of SVM application in the biomedical field.  Maybe, it is rather a question for intellectual property protection specialists.
>
> Thanks again!
>
> Qinghua
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> 发件人: Sean Davis<seandavi at gmail.com>
>
> 抄 送: bioconductor at stat.math.ethz.ch; qinghua.xu at as.biomerieux.com
> 发送日期: 2009/12/14 (周一) 8:38:58 下午
> 主 题: Re: [BioC] Patent issues of classification algorithms
>
>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I would like to know is there any patent related concern when try to publish a microarray study using different classification algorithms, like KNNs, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine and so on?
>>
> [[elided Yahoo spam]]
>
> A couple of places to look:
>
> In the DESCRIPTION of each package available for R, there is a license
> line that may be useful for determining the license under which the
> software is released.  More importantly, though, is probably the
> citation() entry, which gives the citations for the package that
> should be cited if the package is used in a publication.
>
> As for patents, I'm not sure how important that is from a user
> perspective; perhaps others want to comment here.
>
> Sean
>
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