News picks
Articles from other sources; copy title, first paragraph, and put URL in body of post.
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Potočnik called for higher business investment and more involvement of the high-tech industry in the European economy. At present, the high-tech sector accounts for 12% of EU GDP, compared to 18% in the US. Governments must create favourable conditions for fast-growing and innovation-friendly markets and enable cheaper access to an EU-wide patent system, he said (see EurActiv LinksDossier on the 'Community Patent').
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by: 23 Jan 2009 14:36 |
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Open source advocates are going to love the fact that Obama wants to transition the US government away from proprietary solutions. I don’t have any dislike for open source advocates, and I wish them well. I do have a different view of the economics though, and of the patent system. I hear all the time that software patents prohibit innovation, but then when you talk to those who say they cannot create because of patents it is clear that they don’t understand patent law and are saying that not because it is true, but because that is what they belief. It always comes as a shock to computer programmers when they learn that just because it is in a patent doesn’t mean you can’t take it without infringing. They just don’t fully understand that for their to be infringement each and every element of a patent claim needs to be taken and residing in the allegedly infringing product. If you explain it that way then those who are honest realize that most software patents really prevent very lit
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by: 23 Jan 2009 14:35 |
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In short, this is a case that has little to do with tr-lls, but rather is a case that should be the basis for an article on the tactics of prior art searching (how much should small companies spend on searching during patent prosecution versus how much should they spend before entering into negotiations or litigation?). Indeed, if anyone has seen any of the Microsoft reexam requests, I'd be interested in knowing the quality of the new prior art that they found. But the article uses this squabble as an intro into the ill-defined, made up problem or tr-lls (tr-lls being the restless-leg-sydrome of the IP world).
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by: 21 Jan 2009 15:03 |
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There is a lot of pro-software patents lobbying in Europe and Digistan asks the question, "Where does the pressure come from?"Although it does not say this in Digistan, the answer is “Microsoft”, but it’s not alone. Peter Jungen and the EEI wonder if openness rhetorics risks turning Europe into an innovation “dead zone”. We wrote about Peter Jungen last month. He’s likely to be part of the cronies cartel.
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by: 21 Jan 2009 14:32 |
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Interested parties have until the end of April to submit written statements to the EPO’s Enlarged Board of Appeal for the president’s referral on the patentability of computer programs. Given the controversy over the patenting of computer programs in recent years, a large number of submissions can be expected, from the software industry, legal professionals, trade associations and the open-source and anti-software patent communities.
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by: 21 Jan 2009 14:12 |
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Software patents are increasingly being used like lottery tickets: If you file enough of them, you’ll eventually have the winning number for litigation. Information Protection and Authentication of Texas (IPAT) has sued a dozen computer makers and some software developers for allegedly violating two security related patents that it holds. IPAT filed a formal complaint in a south Florida district court last Thursday. Some of the defendants are Apple, Dell, HP and Lenovo. It has also separately filed suit against software makers including Microsoft and Symantec in a Texas court.
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by: 20 Jan 2009 18:11 |
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Tim Lee's article is spot-on. I can tell you from experience that software patents are on balance a net negative for most small, innovative software companies; that so-called "business method" patents are a joke; and that the bar on obviousness has to be raised substantially. A cynic might be forgiven for arguing that the patent system, at least in this area, now operates primarily for the benefit of the patent bar.
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by: 20 Jan 2009 18:10 |
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Prior to 2005, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) applied a fairly restrictive approach to the Schlumberger decision, holding that computer programs per se are not patentable in Canada, because they are considered to be a mere scientific principle or abstract theorem. However, Canadian patents have been granted for systems and devices that use software. In one case, the inclusion of a specific piece of conventional computer hardware, namely read-only memory (ROM), was sufficient to render the ROM that stored the novel software program patentable. Since 2005, CIPO has loosened its interpretation of the Schlumberger decision. CIPO guidelines now state that for a software invention to be patentable, it must be "an act or series of acts performed by some physical agent upon some physical object and producing in such object some change either of character or condition" and "it must produce an essentially economic result in relation to trade, industry or commerce."
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by: 20 Jan 2009 18:08 |
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Moonlight is open source, but the codecs are not - they are binary blobs written by (gulp) Microsoft. But for those living in patent-brain-damaged countries, it's about the least bad of several bad alternatives. Adobe has done some 'evil' things but then so has every software company, even Google. I don't think that playing corporate melodrama, picking goodies and baddies, is a sensible way to decide what software to use. Judge whether you have freedom to use, share and change the software in each case. (For the Flash player the answer is clearly no, although Gnash is getting better.)
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by: 20 Jan 2009 15:54 |
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The Symbian software was allowed a patent by the Court of Appeal because it improved the operation of the software in a mobile phone, which the court said meant that it had a technical effect. The new IPO guidance outlines the change in the IPO's approach in the aftermath of the Symbian decision. "The Intellectual Property Office has previously recognised that an invention which either solves a technical problem external to the computer or solves "a technical problem within the computer" is not excluded," it said. "What Symbian has now shown is that improving the operation of a computer by solving a problem arising from the way the computer was programmed – for example, a tendency to crash due to conflicting library program calls – can also be regarded as solving "a technical problem within the computer" if it leads to a more reliable computer."
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by: 20 Jan 2009 14:32 |
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Some standards activity (e.g. 3GPP) has a long history of royalty-bearing standards inherent in the standards process. While some of us might regard this as ethically suspect, it's real and it needs accommodating. Therefore I suggest modifying the proposal to say "which are required by international (i.e. ISO, IEC or ITU) standards or national regulations where the patents were not disclosed during the standardisation process". This live-and-let-live compromise is likely to avoid the attacks that would otherwise be inevitable from, for example, the mobile telephony industry.
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by: 20 Jan 2009 14:17 |
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Despite the fact that the ICT sector is considered strategic for growth and innovation in the broader economy, the EU has fallen behind its competitors in terms of investments in ICT R & D. As the European Commission prepares to lay out a strategy for this sector in the 21st century, there is increasing pressure on EU and national public authorities to buy ICT products that conform to open standards that contain no intellectual property, or in which the intellectual property is subject to low or zero royalty rates and/or cannot carry use restrictions. Where does this pressure come from? Does it really serve the interests of a European Union determined to compete in the global knowledge economy? Or does the warm-sounding populist rhetoric calling for "openness" risk turning Europe into an innovation "dead zone"?
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by: 20 Jan 2009 13:29 |
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Of course, Judge Moore is correct that Chenery doesn’t apply for yet another reason. The Supreme Court specifically said that alternatives grounds to affirm an agency are appropriate to save the need for a wasteful remand. But that is exactly what the original Comiskey panel did, and exactly what the revised Comiskey decision orders as well. The case is getting remanded to the USPTO for determination about whether the machine claims in the patent are patentable subject matter. Specifically, here is what the revised Comiskey opinion says: "As to all of these claims, which under the broadest reasonable interpretation recite the use of a machine, we think that the § 101 question should be addressed in the first instance by the PTO. We therefore remand to the PTO to consider whether independent claims 17 and 46 (with dependent claims 18-29, 31, 47-57, and 59) and dependent claims 15, 30, 44, and 58 recite patentable subject matter under § 101."
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by: 20 Jan 2009 00:33 |
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When I see the likes of this patent, I think why oh why did primary patent examiner Cam-Linh Nguyen allow this to be passed? I have been writing code where strings are trimmed before saving in a database. This patent has the database do the trim (specified in the column definition) when storing it so you don't need to explicitly do the trim. It's so wonderful because you no longer have to use trim in the SQL (it makes the SQL unreadable according to the patent- must be a terrible problem though one I've never encountered), and this patent avoids that. Wow! Such originality! All this patent really does is stop anyone implementing it as a feature of their database unless they have licensed it from IBM. How exactly does this patent advance the state of computing?
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by: 20 Jan 2009 00:27 |
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NPEs in legal parlance—more commonly referred to as “patent trolls”—derive or plan to derive all or most of their revenue from the enforcement of patents. Patent trolls are clearly distinguishable from major research institutions, universities, and businesses that derive their revenue, respectively, from funded research, tuition and grants, and the sale of products and services. Some of the largest of these NPEs raise large funds with which to purchase the patents they seek to enforce—without any plans to turn those patents into marketable products or services. Instead, they then use these funds to enable—through direct or veiled threats of infringement—their pursuit of royalties from successful businesses.
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by: 20 Jan 2009 00:17 |
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Patent trolls make good poster children for the patent system’s dysfunctions, but focusing too much on them ignores the fact that abusing the patent system is a game played by large companies as well. For example, Verizon managed to extort tens of millions of dollars from Vonage to settle a lawsuit over an absurdly broad Internet telephony patent. Verizon, of course, isn’t a “patent troll,” but a competitor interested in hobbling an up-and-coming competitor. Any patent reform needs to address the Verizons of the world too, not just the NTPs.
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by: 20 Jan 2009 00:13 |
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If we had a well-designed patent system in which only high-quality patents were issued, it would be much harder for patent trolls to engage in . . . abusive behaviors. . . . The reason patent trolling is so profitable is that over the last quarter century the courts have expanded patenting into new areas like software and business methods, and dramatically lowered the bar for receiving a patent. As a result, patents that would have been rejected 30 years ago (like this ridiculous patent on removing white space from database entries, which IBM received earlier this month) are now routinely approved by the Patent Office. As a result, patent trolls are able to buy up low-quality patents by the truckload.
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by: 20 Jan 2009 00:11 |
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If I'm right that, as I argued on Friday, there's a cultural gap between the patent bar and the technology industry on the subject of software patents, an interesting question is how we got them in the first place. After all, it wasn't that long ago that software was widely believed to be unpatentable, and major technology firms were hardly clamoring for patent protection. Peter Mennell, a Berkeley law professor who spoke at last Wednesday's Brookings patent conference had an interesting perspective on how this came about. He argues that the impetus for software patents came from patent attorneys within major software firms who spread the "gospel of patenting" within their companies. Not surprisingly, CEOs tend to delegate patent issues to their patent lawyers, and of course patent lawyers will tend to have more pro-patent views than their bosses. And so despite the fact that few technology executives were enthusiastic about patenting, the patent lawyers who worked for them pushed thei
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by: 20 Jan 2009 00:09 |
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A good number of the panelists recognized the dysfunctionality of the current patent system as it relates to software and business method patents. They acknowledged such problems for software developers as unmanageable litigation risks, the fuzzy and unpredictable boundaries of software patents, and the difficulties of identifying relevant patents. A couple of scholars noted that large software firms, among others, publicly opposed software patents in the 1980s. Some of the harm from software patents is obvious. Do they provide any compensating benefit? There was little, if any, evidence that they encourage innovation. Although the number of software patents has exploded in recent years, one panelist expressed doubt that success in the technology area was associated with patent ownership. He observed that had the young Bill Gates been confronted at the outset with the litigation risks of tens of thousands of software patents, he might have chosen to exercise his entrepreneurial skills
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by: 20 Jan 2009 00:06 |
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This is very disturbing because any conceivable idea that’s implemented in software seems to be assigned to someone. Even if the patent is not granted to a patent troll it can easily have its ownership passed. Patents, i.e. ideas, can be bought and sold, which may seem bizarre to outsider. It makes harvesting of imaginary property (or “bubbles”) possible and even trivial.
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by: 19 Jan 2009 23:45 |
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