KiberPipa: EU vs EPO and Patent litigation in Europe - "The European Union (EU) plans to delegate its power to grant Community Patents to a non-Community institution, the European Patent Office (EPO). The EPO is not bound by any EU regulation, and is often described by academics as a 'state in the state'. Members of the European Parliament have also criticized the EPO for its lack of political accountability. The EPO grants software patents for the European Patent, and will probably grant such patents for the Community Patent."

BPradio: Death to Software Patents! Nah….. - "Rather than try to solve these issues en masse, we settled for a good conversation with a friend from across the Atlantic, Paul Cole, a chartered patent agent, patent litigator, and law professor from the UK who has written and spoken widely on issues of software patents."

IPkat: Software patents: all talk - "The IPKat has just listened to an interesting talk from BP/G radio on the subject of software patents in the US and Europe, involving a conversation between US attorneys from Merchant & Gould and the well-known (and softly spoken) UK and European patent attorney Paul Coles."

HuffingtonPost: At the Heart of the Knowledge Economy: Should Patents Be Limited To Technology? - "The case, In re Bilski, involves a pure business method, no technology, not even making use of a computer. It involves hedging bets in commodity markets by matching conservative buyers against others more inclined to gamble on the expected. In fact, it sounds a lot like how bookies handle betting on horse races. But the issue here is not whether this process is new or nonobvious but whether it should be patentable in the first place. Should we allow patents on tax-avoidance strategies? Legal arguments? Mathematical algorithms? Toilet reservation systems? Negotiation tactics? Business models?"

PersonalBee: Let's Make Software Patents "Defensive Only" - "I asked him if he thought this was a unique perspective and he said no - he thinks many experienced software engineers are skeptical of software patents. While they are skeptical, they understand the battle going on right now and realize the value of ever increasingly large number of patents for defensive purposes. Wouldn't it be interesting if there was a grass roots movement of experienced software engineers around software patents for defensive purposes only."

ZDNet: Mozilla warns of Flash and Silverlight 'agenda' - "Tristan Nitot, the founder of Mozilla Europe warned that such applications threaten the open nature of the internet because the companies behind them could "have an agenda". While he conceded that Flash was currently necessary for consistently displaying content such as video, he suggested that the upcoming revision of the HTML specification would make it unnecessary to use proprietary technology."

Ars: Microsoft RoundTable under scrutiny for patent infringement - "On April 29, 2008, 360 degree camera producer Fullview filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The suit claims that Microsoft RoundTable conferencing product infringes on US Patent #6,700,711, which Fullview received on March 2, 2004."

Two-thirds of US patent appeal judges may be illegitimate - "Prof. John Duffy of GWU Law School has uncovered that US patent appeal judges have been unconstitutionally appointed over the last 8 years."

BoycottNovell: Clarification on MySQL and Software Patents - "I had a conversation with Marten Mickos yesterday. A lot of it was not relevant to this Web site’s focus (e.g. business models), but the issue of MySQL & patents, which was covered here before [1, 2] (quite critically in fact), came up at one stage. There appears to be full alignment in terms of our views. MySQL remains an opposer of software patents in Europe (alongside Sun Microsystems) and it acknowledges the existing problems. In his own words, to quote what he permitted me to share publicly: “As long as we have software patents legally in our market, the owners of such patents may try to make money on them in FOSS environments, and some will succeed."

OSS-Watch: Software Patents: Follow The Leader - "Enterprise Linux distributor Red Hat has entered what is called an ‘amicus’ brief in a patent appeal case on the US Federal Circuit. A man named Bernard Bilski had applied for a patent on a method for controlling risk in the energy commodity market. The US Patent and Trademark Office rejected the claim as being ‘directed to non-statutory subject matter’ (pdf link), which means that it attempted to gain patent control over something that is excluded from being patented by law. So what does the US law say about what can and cannot be patented?"