News picks
Articles from other sources; copy title, first paragraph, and put URL in body of post.
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Last week, a jury ruled that content distribution network operator Limelight had infringed a patent held by competitor Akamai, and awarded damages of $46 million. Limelight is only the latest victim of Akamai's long-running effort to use its patent portfolio to knock its competitors out of the market. [...] The patent in question, No. 6,108,703, was granted to MIT in 2000 and has been licensed to Akamai. It covers a "global hosting system" in which "a base HTML document portion of a Web page is served from the Content Provider's site while one or more embedded objects for the page are served from the hosting servers, preferably, those hosting servers near the client machine."
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by: 02 Feb 2009 12:23 |
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The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) threatens to reverse long-standing patent neutrality, and eliminate an entire class of innovation from eligibility for patenting --- i.e. innovative business processes, by limiting protection only to processes that are “machine-implemented” or that “transform an article to a different state or thing.” This limitation on human ingenuity threatens the future of U.S. innovation and its competitiveness in the global economy, particularly at a time when our economy is most dependent on services and information. [...] Criticism over "trivial" patents that have slipped through an overburdened U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has led to mounting pressure to rein in such abuses and reform the system. Unfortunately, business process innovations have become the scapegoat for these abuses. Trivial patents are a problem that requires a solution, but shutting business-related processes out of patent protection is not that solution.
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by: 02 Feb 2009 12:06 |
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Inventors Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw said, “We welcome the Supreme Court reviewing the case. The creation of new business methods is critical to spurring economic growth in this country. The Federal Circuit’s Bilski decision is a throwback to the 19th century when our economy was primarily manufacturing based, and fails to recognize that many inventions are based on ideas not necessarily tied to a machine or piece of equipment. Prior to the Federal Circuit’s decision, the ability to patent a business method put the U.S. squarely ahead of the rest the world in protecting valuable intellectual property assets that are integral to encouraging innovation in today’s economy. The Federal Circuit’s decision represents a step backward.”
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by: 02 Feb 2009 11:56 |
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Since Post-Issue is focused on already issued patents, there is no association with the USPTO. Some of our steering committee members believed there was a logical step to be taken from building a community to help find prior art to support the examination efforts of the USPTO to tapping into that same community to help find prior art relevant to issued patents that may contain claims of questionable merit. Open Invention Network was certainly interested from the perspective of the Linux environment, but they also agreed the platform needed to be neutral and be available to all. To date our focus has been on so-called software patents.
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by: 02 Feb 2009 11:35 |
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The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a popular format to publish formatted text and documents. There are several different versions of it, some qualifying as an Open Standard, some certified by ISO and some encumbered by software patents. You might want to promote the versions that are Open Standards, because Open Standards guarantee interoperability, competition and choice.
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by: 02 Feb 2009 11:02 |
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On this view, the Supreme Court's historical hostility toward patents on software is merely an historical accident—a "residual overhang" that we'd do well to get beyond. Guided by a strong policy preference for the patentability of software and business methods, Duffy and Merges seem to feel that the Federal Circuit should give little weight to Supreme Court decisions that they regard as out of touch with the modern realities of the software industry. After all, this is "just the price we have to pay to get a software patent these days." I don't agree with this perspective. I've long sympathized with software patent critics such as Ben Klemens who argue that the Supreme Court's precedents place clear limits on the patenting of software.
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by: 02 Feb 2009 10:23 |
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The first thing that our policymaker should do is realise that every time you protect somebody’s output, their intellectual work, you extend their trademark, you give them control over some gene sequence, some line of code, you have extensive software patents, you are raising the costs of the inputs to another innovator further upstream.
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by: 02 Feb 2009 09:08 |
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Mozilla has given the Wikimedia Foundation a $100,000 grant intended to fund development of the Ogg container format and the Theora and Vorbis media codecs. These open media codecs are thought to be unencumbered by software patents, which means that they can be freely implemented and used without having to pay royalties or licensing fees to patent holders. This differentiates Ogg Theora from many other formats that are widely used today.
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by: 02 Feb 2009 09:07 |
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In the backdrop of this recent achievement, Dr.Guruduth Banavar, Director, IBM India Research Laboratory, talks to Sudhakaran of CyberMedia News about the company's initiatives to ensure patent quality and plan to help stimulate innovation and economic growth by publishing more technical inventions instead of seeking patent protection. [...] How many patents do you have in India? Sorry, in sync with the IBM's globally integrated collaborative work culture and strongly aligned processes, we don't reveal country specific numbers.
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by: 02 Feb 2009 09:06 |
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The President of the European Patent Office (EPO) has referred several questions of law to the EPO’s Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBoA) in an attempt to clarify the patentability of software-based inventions. The European Patent Convention excludes software "as such" from patentability, but EPO Technical Boards of Appeal (TBAs) have often allowed patents for inventions where the inventive step is entirely performed by software, as long as the invention has “technical character”. However, there have been inconsistent interpretations of what this means. For example, in one case, a TBA found that executing software on a general-purpose computer or storing it in a computer-readable memory was sufficient to confer technical character.
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by: 31 Jan 2009 15:56 |
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The BPAI has again raised the issue of Post-Bilski patentable subject matter sua sponte. Like most claims challenged under Section101, Atkins claims also have serious nonobvousness and indefiniteness problems. Atkins claims a method of "converting a unidirectional domain name to a bidirectional domain name." In reviewing the claim under Bilski, the BPAI noted that the claims do not "recite any machine or apparatus or call for transforming an article into a different state or thing. A domain name is simply a series of characters representing the address of a resource, such as a server, on the World Wide Web. All of the steps are data manipulation steps."
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by: 31 Jan 2009 11:22 |
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Section 273 of the Patent Act mentions the possibility of a patent covering “a method of doing or conducting business.” Part of Bilski’s petition for certiorari relies on that section as an argument that Congress intended for Section 101 to cover business methods. That argument is a red herring -- The Federal Circuit's Bilski decision did not eliminate business method patents. Rather, the decision only requires that any claimed process meet the machine-or-transformation test.
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by: 31 Jan 2009 11:21 |
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Now, Bilski has petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari — asking the high court to determine whether the new test of patentable subject matter is the correct test. The petition asks two questions: 1. Whether the Federal Circuit erred by holding that a “process” must be tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or transform a particular article into a different state or thing … despite this Court’s precedent declining to limit the broad statutory grant of patent eligibility for “any” new and useful process beyond excluding patents for “laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas. 2. Whether the Federal Circuit’s “machine-or-transformation” test for patent eligibility, which effectively forecloses meaningful patent protection to many business methods, contradicts the clear Congressional intent that patents protect “method[s] of doing or conducting business.” 35 U.S.C. § 273.
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by: 31 Jan 2009 11:20 |
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In three recent cases, the BPAI has continued its trend of applying the Federal Circuit's en banc Bilski decision to reject software-style method claims as lacking patentable subject matter. The BPAI is not asserting that software is unpatentable -- the Board is simply failing to find ties to a particular machine; transformation of a physical object; or transformation of articles "representative of physical objects." In two of the cases, the BPAI applied its power to issue new grounds of rejection -- raising the Section 101 issue sua sponte.
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by: 31 Jan 2009 11:18 |
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Bernard Bilski's petition for certiorari is due within days (unless an extension is granted). I think that there is a real question of whether (and how) the patent community should react to presentation of the case. Should the patent community support this case for Supreme Court review, wait for a better situated case, or sit content with the machine-or-transformation test outlined by the Federal Circuit in the en banc Bilski decision? Each position has its merits.
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by: 31 Jan 2009 11:17 |
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On December 1, 2008, the Federal Circuit upheld a district court ruling that Qualcomm waived its right to enforce patents for video compression technology developed by members of the Joint Video Team (“JVT”) standards-setting organization. Qualcomm participated in the JVT and had an obligation to disclose patents that “reasonably might be necessary” to practice the H 264 standard. Because of failure to disclose patents to the Standard Setting Organization, the Federal Circuit decided that Qualcomm waived its right to enforce video compression patents.
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by: 31 Jan 2009 11:12 |
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This month's Official Journal of the EPO contains an announcement relating to the EPO President's referral under Article 112(1)(b) EPC on software patents. As well as reproducing the questions first announced back in October 2008 (commented on by the IPKat here, here and here) and the composition of the board, the announcement says the following: "It is expected that third parties will wish to use the opportunity to file written statements in accordance with Article 10 of the Rules of Procedure of the Enlarged Board of Appeal (OJ EPO 2007, 303 ff). To ensure that any such statements can be given due consideration they should be filed together with any new cited documents by the end of April 2009 at the Registry of the Enlarged Board of Appeal, quoting case number G 3/08. An additional filing of the statement and documents in electronic form would be appreciated (Dg3registry_eba@epo.org)." It's not clear to the IPKat whether comments received only by email will be accepted, but he think
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by: 31 Jan 2009 11:09 |
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This trend toward selling ideas is one symptom of an attitude that I've noticed more and more among programmers over the past few years-an attitude of which software patents are the most obvious manifestation-a desire to think something up without breaking a sweat, then let someone else?s hard work make you money. Its an attitude that says, "I'm so smart that my ideas alone set me apart." Sorry, it doesn't work that way in the real world. Ideas are a dime a dozen in programming, too; I have a lifetime's worth of article and software ideas written neatly in a notebook, and I know several truly original thinkers who have far more yet. Folks, it's not the ideas; it's design, implementation, and especially hard work that make the difference.
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by: 31 Jan 2009 10:47 |
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This year, the biggest issue in US patent law may be: what types of inventions are patentable? The US Supreme Court and the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) have toughened their stance on this issue in recent years, narrowing the scope of patentable inventions. The US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals - often called the nation's "patent court" - apparently joined this trend in the second half of 2008 with a series of rulings, the most important of which was In re Bilski. In Bilski, an en banc Federal Circuit repudiated a test the court had laid out ten years before in its seminal decision, State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group Inc. - that a process was patentable if it produces a "useful, concrete and tangible result." The Bilski court replaced that test with an older, stricter standard that had been repeatedly enunciated by the Supreme Court: a process is patentable if "(1) it is tied to a particular machine ... or (2) it transforms a particular article into
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by: 31 Jan 2009 10:45 |
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With the USPTO and courts cracking down on software patents, Ars looks closely at the Supreme Court's software patent decisions. Yes, the Supremes really did say that algorithms can't be patented. In spite of the fact that their rulings have been functionally ignored for almost 20 years, the tide may be about to turn.
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by: 31 Jan 2009 10:37 |
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