News picks
Articles from other sources; copy title, first paragraph, and put URL in body of post.
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The Microsoft-Alcatel MP3 case is just one of many that suggest to some that the patent system itself has lurched out of control, giving too much power to those laying claim to intellectual property and allowing too much leeway to patents of dubious quality or worth.
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by: 21 Dec 2007 00:15 |
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According to a recent analysis by IEEE, Microsoft's patent portfolio tops the industry in terms of overall quality of its patents. And while Microsoft came in second to IBM in The Patent Board's 2006 survey, its upcoming 2007 report has Microsoft besting IBM (and even its 2006 report had Microsoft #1 in terms of the "scientific strength" of its patent portfolio). All of which begs the question: Just where is all this innovation going? To Clippy? Consumers and business users don't buy patents.
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by: 21 Dec 2007 00:10 |
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An Accenture statement referred to the company's belief that "Guidewire willfully and deliberately developed, manufactured, used and sold ... computer software and services used for insurance claims management that are covered by Accenture U.S. Patent 7,013, 284." Accenture also claims that Guidewire "willfully and maliciously obtained Accenture trade secrets without authorization" as part of an ongoing effort to compete against Accenture in the claims software market.
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by: 20 Dec 2007 23:31 |
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According to the complaint filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, Audiovox has breached its contractual obligations by failing to report fully its manufacture or sale of products such as DVD players and digital TVs that use the MPEG-2 digital video compression standard or employ the high-speed transfer digital interface provided for in the IEEE 1394 standard, failing to make full payments for its manufacture or sale of such products, and refusing to allow an audit as permitted by the MPEG-2 Contract and 1394 Contract.
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by: 20 Dec 2007 23:24 |
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Sipro Lab Telecom, the administrator of the G.729 Patent Pool which represents the essential IPR and has contributed to this popular communications standard developed by the G.729 Consortium members:France Telecom, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, and Universite de Sherbrooke, announced today that the patent royalty pricing options available to end-product manufacturers will be modified as ofJanuary 1st, 2008.
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by: 20 Dec 2007 23:23 |
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From my read of a Microsoft Patent application just published today, technology is being proposed that will make it impossible for users who download multimedia files to play these files unless advertising messages inserted within these files are viewed. In other words, no circumvention, no skipping a la the TiVo model.
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by: 20 Dec 2007 23:20 |
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For me, one of the key things about free software and patents is that we are all in the same boat. It is vitally important to the continued success of the community development model that one part of the community does not enter into an agreement which gives some people patent protection while leaving other people out in the cold. That is why I was so opposed to the patent agreements recently entered into by Novell, Xandros and other companies. I considered those agreements to be dubious at best, and certainly a violation of at least the spirit of the GNU General Public License. I was very glad to see this sort of shenanigans prevented in version 3 of the GPL.
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by: 20 Dec 2007 22:47 |
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The idea in this patent, submitted by Yahoo!, is a clever little idea: if someone is starting to drag an icon or mail message somewhere, why not bring the mountain to Mohammed, so to speak? If she is dragging a photo, for instance, the browser or operating system can guess that she wants to open it with PhotoShop or the Gimp, and present that choice right next to the icon for the photo.
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by: 20 Dec 2007 14:52 |
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NetApp sued Sun Microsystems claiming that the ZFS technology Sun open sourced in 2005 infringes NetApp patents. Sun contributed ZFS to the community, and that contribution is now under attack from a vendor that wants to keep the IT community locked into its proprietary solutions. Among other things, NetApp is asking a court to order Sun to remove the ZFS code from open source.
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by: 20 Dec 2007 12:53 |
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I received this update from Sun Microsystems on Tuesday on the ongoing ZFS patent litigation with NetApp. While colored by its source, the news seems positive for Sun (and, given the importance of ZFS, for the open-source development community). Sun has succeeded in getting the venue changed to California and it appears that its public request for examples of prior art have yielded fruit.
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by: 20 Dec 2007 12:52 |
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EBay Inc. and its PayPal unit won a patent litigation case against Netcraft Tuesday, the San Jose, Calif.-based company said late Wednesday. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin said eBay's and PayPal's online billing methods did not infringe on patents assigned to Netcraft, eBay said.
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by: 20 Dec 2007 12:20 |
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Acacia Research Corp., which develops, acquires and licenses patented technologies, said Wednesday its Financial Systems Innovation LLC unit reached a settlement on a patent dispute with J Choo USA Inc., provider of Jimmy Choo shoes. [...] The lawsuit related to credit-card fraud protection technology that included an electronic card reader and the creation and use of a transaction number that identifies each transaction processed within the system.
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by: 20 Dec 2007 12:18 |
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Given that the communication technically relates to computer programs retrieving copies of priority documents, as part of the business method (‘administrative task’, if you will) of processing patent applications by technical means, how could there be any ‘technical character’ regarding the reasons why the communication might have issued if the priority documents were instead technically filed by the applicant? Could there be a special cleverly-designed piece of technical machinery somewhere at the EPO where all priority documents have to be technically processed? Or does computerised technical processing of priority documents inherently possess technical character?
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by: 20 Dec 2007 12:17 |
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The one sticking point that Alex doesn’t mention is software patents. If browsers go out and patent every innovative feature they develop, these features will not be freely available for the W3C to standardize for adoption by the other browsers. But perhaps that’s a smaller problem than the ones we’re faced with currently.
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by: 19 Dec 2007 13:12 |
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The agenda of the College of Commissioners of today indicates that the Commission is voting on a proceeding under art 81 of the EC Treaty. Is it the rubberstamping of the Microsoft-Kroes patent deal?
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by: 19 Dec 2007 13:09 |
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Well, there have been a series of new applications hitting the PtP site lately, some of which are pretty broad and outrageous. For example, check out this one from Yahoo! claiming to have patented "smart" drag-and-drop technology.
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by: 19 Dec 2007 12:49 |
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Accenture Ltd (ACN.N) said on Tuesday it filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Guidewire Software Inc over an insurance claims management technology. Accenture said in a statement its lawsuit alleges that Guidewire “misappropriated Accenture trade secrets relating to the design, coding and implementation of the claims management technology Accenture developed and patented.”
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by: 19 Dec 2007 12:47 |
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The suit, filed in the U.S. District court in Wilmington, Del., alleges that Vonage violated 12 of Nortel's patents relating to its Internet phone services, including 911 and 411 services and click-to-call. Nortel is seeking damages and an injunction on the use of the technologies by Vonage. "From our perspective defending our intellectual properly rights is certainly a top priority for Nortel," said Nortel spokesman Mohammed Nakhooda. Vonage became involved in the dispute in 2006 when it acquired Digital Packet Licensing and three patents it held. Those patents were the foundation for a suit DPL filed against Toronto-based Nortel alleging patent infringement in 2004.
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by: 18 Dec 2007 22:44 |
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The suit comes in the wake of a suit filed against Nortel by Vonage earlier this year that alleged Nortel violated three of Vonage's patents. Two of the patents involved in that suit -- numbers 4,782,485 and 5,018,136 -- concern multiplexed digital-packet telephone systems. The third patent -- No. 5,444,707 -- concerns packet-switching communications systems. Vonage acquired these three patents from Digital Packet Licensing in 2006.
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by: 18 Dec 2007 22:41 |
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The EPO has a page on its website about "Computer-Implemented Inventions (CII)" where they answer the question "Why are such programs not patentable in Europe?". Unfortunately, the answer does not reflect the law, but the EPO interpretation of the law.
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by: 18 Dec 2007 13:51 |
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