[BioC] SVM Patent Discussion

[Hsu Qinghua]

Dear all,
Recently, I notice that several Support Vector Machine related patents had 
been granted to the company- Healthy Discovery Corporation since 1990s. In 
particular, the patent "Enhancing Knowledge Discovery from Multiple Data Sets 
Using Multiple Support Vector Machines" were granted in US, Europe, China, 
Australia, India, Germany, Israel and Norway. Besides, another two 
patents "U.S. Patent No. 7,542,959: Feature Selection Using Support Vector 
Machine Classifier" and " U.S. Patent No. 7,805,388: Feature Selection for a 
Support Vector Machine Using Feature Ranking" should specifically protect the 
RFE-SVM method. 

A message found in the internet 
(http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=61600435):
"The company plans to initiate its new academic/research institution licensing 
program in the second quarter of 2011. Universities and research institutions 
that have reported the use of SVMs in published reports such as academic 
journals and conference proceedings will be contacted and offered a paid-up 
license against past and future infringement of the Company’s patented 
technology for a nominal one-time license administrative fee plus a percentage 
of any revenue generated when the results of the SVM usage are licensed for 
commercialization. The program will begin first with admitted usages of the 
Company’s SVM-RFE method. To date, over 30 U.S. institutions have been 
identified as using RFE through review of academic publications, with many of 
the reported uses relating to biomarker discovery and medical diagnostics. The 
Company plans to expand its licensing efforts to European institutions once 
all formalities have been completed for validation of the recently-granted 
European SVM-RFE patent. The program will later be broadened to other reported 
uses of SVM and other technology covered by the Company’s patents."

I am wondering if these patents will indeed block the public use of basic SVM 
for data mining? 

Best regards
Qinghua