News picks
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In accordance with Article 112(1)(b) EPC, the President of the European Patent Office has referred the following points of law concerning the limits of patentability of programs for computers within the meaning of Article 52(2)(c) and (3) EPC to the Enlarged Board of Appeal. The case is pending under ref. No. G 3/08. [...] 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)
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by: 29 Jan 2009 12:10 |
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Technology firms are often hampered by patent disputes, but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office called into question last week a patent that had the potential to disrupt the habits of millions of Internet users. The PTO rejected all 20 patent claims over Internet subdomains held by a company called Hoshiko, which were used to bully sites like LiveJournal and Freehomepage.com and pursue litigation against larger companies like Google. The idea behind how to manage subdomains--domains hosted within larger domains, such as news.cnet.com--is too obvious to patent, the PTO ruled after the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation requested the patent be re-examined.
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by: 26 Jan 2009 18:38 |
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Disputes on the EPO patents are decided by national courts with the risk of multiple litigation. Consequently, the Council is working on a draft agreement to create a new European-wide jurisdiction. The agreement will be between the States wishing to ratify it and the EU itself. [...] Also, the Council is examining whether the EU has competence to conclude the draft Agreement. This document shows that the issue of a possible request to the Court of Justice for an opinion under Article 300 §6 EC is being discussed. Unfortunately, the actual assessment of the compatibility of the draft Agreement with the EU legal order is not publicly available and has been edited out.
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by: 26 Jan 2009 18:18 |
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An undisclosed number of mobile marketing firms and SMS aggregators have received a legal letter from TeleCommunication Systems Inc. alleging infringement of short code patents. The letter, from TCS law firm Flachsbart & Greenspoon LLC, claims that the mobile marketing firms are infringing its client’s United States Patent Nos. 6,891,811 and 7,355,990 based on the use of MO-to-application SMS short codes. If proved true, the demands could roil the mobile marketing industry and affect SMS text messaging programs.
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by: 26 Jan 2009 18:13 |
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As reported by Mobile Marketer several days ago, a number of mobile marketing firms and SMS aggregators have received a letter from TeleCommunication Systems Inc. (“TeleCom”) alleging infringement of two U.S. patents for short code messaging. This article presents a summary of the rights conferred by U.S. patents and possible defenses to TeleCom’s assertions (see story).
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by: 26 Jan 2009 18:12 |
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I’ve been thinking a fair amount about software patents the last couple of weeks. I recently attended a Brookings Institution conference that focused pretty heavily on software patents, and since then I’ve interviewed several sharp patent scholars in preparation for a forthcoming article. In those conversations, I noticed the same cultural gulf I blogged about on Techdirt last week. You might say that on the subject of software patents, lawyers are from Mars and programmers are from Venus.
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by: 26 Jan 2009 18:11 |
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I simply love the way patent system works nowdays (or not). They are filling patents *only* to defend themselves from other companies - not to protect inventions like it was intended by creators of patent system. Not that I agree with software patents (I don't) but who else would someone be protecting innovations from other then other companies?
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by: 26 Jan 2009 18:08 |
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Since the United States Supreme Court first addressed the patentability of computer software in Gottschalk v. Benson the law surrounding the patentability of software has changed considerably, leaving many to wonder whether software is patentable at all. Originally in Benson, the Supreme Court decided that software was not patentable, but then later retracted the blanket prohibition against patenting software. The Federal Circuit then spent the better part of two decades trying to figure out under what circumstances software (or computer related processes) should be patented. This seemed to culminate in the 1998 ruling of the Federal Circuit in State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc. Unfortunately, the waters were once again made murky as a result of the 2008 ruling by the Federal Circuit in In re Bilski.
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by: 26 Jan 2009 18:03 |
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Brimelow befriended the audience early on by recognising, and voicing frustration at, weaknesses in the patent system. Europe’s seeming inability to move forward with a Community patent and/or a single patent jurisdiction, and the global issue of the unnecessary duplication of work and the backlog it is helping to create, were at the fore. As Brimelow freely admitted, she has no radical proposals to offer. But she did insist that the future of the patent system is a subject that requires action rather than the wait and see attitude she said was favoured by many in the IP world. If those who work inside the IP system do not help shape the future, others will do it for them, Brimelow said.
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by: 26 Jan 2009 18:02 |
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I've been a free software developer since 1991, and active in various political issues like software patents. I've been writing various books on and off for a decade but those seem to take too much bandwidth, so now I stick to short writing (www.aliopacto.com, www.devilswiki.com). You are a regular speaker at FOSDEM, how was the response to your talks the preceding years? Oh, people find the talk of software patents to be depressing. It's like when you ask someone "how are you?" and they tell you their cancer story. Sure, it's important, but it's not the stuff of parties. Still, I found the FOSDEM participants to be surprisingly tolerant of this guy who keeps popping up and saying, "BEWARE! They want to steal your software!" For that, thanks! I promise to not do it again.
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by: 26 Jan 2009 17:41 |
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Gnash isn't a media platform, it's part of one. We want to free-up the entire user space for flash based applications. So we've also been maintaining the Ming project, which we use as our flash compiler, and I've been lately working heavily on a media server that speaks ActionScript and RTMP and can support video conferencing and groupware applications. Over time, we plan to modify these tools from the creation side to the server to the client to predominately use patent free codecs. We'd also like to put a nice simple GUI on Ming, as now all our flash creation tools are command line oriented.
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by: 26 Jan 2009 17:39 |
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Let’s see how this works. Property rights are protected. Trade is free. People made useful stuff. People bought stuff and used it. They imitated and emulated each other and improved things step by step through investment, profit, and re-investment. That's all. All development since this great age of innovation that preceding software IP has built on this foundation of open-source material. Bill Gates: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."
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by: 26 Jan 2009 17:33 |
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The mixed-source model is essentially similar to the first, but involves the grudging acknowledgment that some open source products are okay-ish, while, at the same time, suggesting that what you really need is the vendor's fine proprietary software to do the real work. Unsurprisingly, this model only works when combined with legal threats and the encumbrance--real or presumed--of software patents and other barriers to entry. Minimal benefits are passed on to the user in a "buy this and we'll throw in one of these for free" approach that also perpetuates the mixed-source vendor's propaganda that free software is not as good as proprietary.
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by: 26 Jan 2009 17:32 |
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In October, US Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue announced that the GIPC, which had previously been focused on counterfeiters, would rise to the challenge of what the chamber characterised as a "second threat [from] a growing movement of anti-IP activists drawn from universities, foundations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), ideologically driven interest groups, and even governments." These anti-IP activists, the chamber said, were annually spending tens of millions of dollars on an agenda to minimise intellectual property rights.
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by: 26 Jan 2009 13:22 |
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Last October I reported that the President of the European Patent Office (EPO), Ms Alison Brimelow, had referred a set of basic questions to the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) concerning the patentability of computer-implemented inventions. It has been and it is still somewhat unclear as to whether or not EBA will accept the admissibility of Ms Bromelow's move. Now, a reader of this blog has pointed me to a notice on the MIP website saying, referring to the latest issue 1/2009 of the EPO Official Journal: "Under Article 10 of the Enlarged Board’s Rules of Procedure, interested parties can file written statements. [...] 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"
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by: 26 Jan 2009 12:51 |
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Although I'm a lawyer, and I suspect many in the audience are lawyers, it's important to start, I think, with economics because what we're concerned about is innovation, and especially in these grave times what we can do to promote innovation. And the question that arises is to what extent do certain types of patents promote innovation. It's not about patents as an end in themselves obviously. It's a question of whether the economic goal of innovation is being promoted through patents. The empirical economic evidence on this is becoming remarkably richer, and that is a wonderful thing, thanks to the contributions of folks like these on the panel. With respect to this evidence, it's pretty clear that at least for large firms, patents most directly affirmatively promote innovation in areas like chemistry and pharmaceuticals that involve technologies that are less abstract than some of the technologies we'll be considering today.
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by: 26 Jan 2009 12:34 |
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Repealing software patents could give a much-needed boost to the tech industry in troubled economic times. Software patents affect all developers, commercial vendors, and open source hobbyists alike. Patents restrict what functionality we can include in our applications, how our programs can interoperate, and how and where they can be deployed. In turn, this affects every computer user, by limiting features, raising prices, and slowing the pace of progress. [...] Software patents were a bad idea from the start. They have already been rejected by the European Union, and it's time the United States rejected them, too. Please, Mr. President -- think of your BlackBerry.
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by: 23 Jan 2009 14:45 |
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It's no surprise that many technologists and engineers dislike software patents -- even as their company's execs and lawyers push them to get more patents. Stephen Kinsella highlights an anonymous comment from a software engineer who clearly works for IBM (though he doesn't come out and say that directly), where he explains how IBM actively encourage engineers to file for as many patents as possible (it rewards them with monetary bonuses). This is not new of course -- an awful lot of companies do this. However, the guy goes on to explain why even though he holds patents and believes very strongly that his company makes and sells nuermous innovative products, he believes all this patenting is damaging to the process of innovation.
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by: 23 Jan 2009 14:40 |
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Secondly, the single market must also take care of the needs of small business. They play a crucial part in innovation and job creation. More than ever, our priority in 2009 must be to improve and ease the environment to help firms – and in particular SMEs – to cope with the deepening recession. Several reform proposals are on the table of the Council right now and can yield large cost-savings for companies quickly. The Commission’s proposal on a simple, single European private company statute of June 2008 must be mentioned, as well as the Community patent and the proposal for a unified patent jurisdiction. The EU will table a proposal to give Member State an option to exempt micro-entities from the accounting rules. All these proposals can save SMEs large amounts of money. But time is of the essence. Member States must now cast aside vested interests and national vanities and reach agreement.
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by: 23 Jan 2009 14:39 |
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I am just a patent attorney who thinks software ought to be patentable and that the Federal Circuit went way farther than it should have in Bilski. But I can’t help but notice that by making open source software a priority President Obama is potentially showing his hand and throwing in with those who would rather not see a strong and vibrant patent system. Perhaps I am reading to much into this and far to anxious about who he might appoint to be the next Director of the USPTO. Call me a worry wart if you will, but I don’t like where this might head. It is bad news for the software industry as we know it, and if he has these opinions on software what will his opinions on pharmaceuticals be?
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by: 23 Jan 2009 14:37 |
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