News picks
Articles from other sources; copy title, first paragraph, and put URL in body of post.
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Guruduth Banavar, director, IBM India Research Laboratory, said: “To help stimulate innovation and economic growth, IBM plans to increase by 50 per cent, to more than 3,000, the number of technical inventions it publishes annually instead of seeking patent protection”. He, however, highlighted IBM’s pledge not to assert certain software patents against the open source community; and not to assert any patent against 150 software interoperability standards.
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by: 15 Jan 2009 10:00 |
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We almost hate to point it out, but GNU/Linux is already free, as is Open Office along with a lot of other quite useful free and open source software (FOSS) products. However, there are other software freedom efforts that can certainly use help - notably free software prior art collation and the battle to extinguish software patents with all of their pernicious influences.
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by: 15 Jan 2009 09:58 |
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The European Union is producing legislation that affects Digital Rights. The European Parliament blocked the proposal for a directive granting software patents, which affect the right to access knowledge. Recently, the public debate on the Telecom Package brought up a discussion on rights such as Net Neutrality and Consumer Rights. The EU is expected to produce soon new legislation on copyrights.
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by: 15 Jan 2009 09:57 |
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The presence of patented components within a protocol is extremely undesirable. The purpose of a protocol is to define an agreed-upon expected behavior, thus providing common ground for cooperation within an industry. The presence of patents within a protocol places restrictions on its implementation and usage, and therefore serves to undermine this purpose. The Free Protocols Foundation (FPF) is an independent public forum, dedicated to the support of patent-free protocols. We do this by means of the following major activities: * By providing an independent, external forum in which an Author may make an initial declaration that a protocol is intended to be patent-free.
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by: 15 Jan 2009 09:53 |
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There are some videos of ICT2008 at europa.eu where the CEO of TomTom says that they spent more money on patent litigation in 2006 than anything else. Media.ffii.org has this copy. At the end of the clip they also talk about patents. The CEO says: “Once we were successful, the part of technology and the cost and the amount of down again. I remember clearly in 2005, we spent more money on patent disputes, patent fights than all our technology development put together.”
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by: 14 Jan 2009 22:41 |
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TomTom CEO: "There is a very cumbersome patent situation that inevitably works against everyone who is trying to build business. It is very difficult and expensive to build a broad patent portfolio. As soon as you become successfull, you need to deal with all that. There is a whole lot of legislation that you need to deal with as a small company, and that is cumbersome, that is difficult."
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by: 14 Jan 2009 22:39 |
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TomTom CEO Harold Goddijn: "Once we were successful, the part of technology and the cost and the amount of money we spent on technology as a proportion of other expenses we had went down again. I remember clearly in 2005, we spent more money on patent disputes, patent fights then all our technology development put together."
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by: 14 Jan 2009 22:04 |
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We honestly don't care about the politics of companies who give us money. If they are technically involved in the development of open source software, we are happy to relieve them of any excess cash they happen to have lying about. Our business is organizing one of the best and largest open source development conferences in Europe. Our business is software, not politics. We determine our budget based on what we need, not on who we want to take money from.
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by: 13 Jan 2009 18:07 |
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Accepting “dirty” money from Novell should only be done with an outspoke distanciation from their actions. They have been buying and corrupting Free Software along the way by injecting dissension in the community and [software] patent threats [as a proxy] here and there, each time more. They do it as partners of Microsoft. Or as Bob Muglia, Microsoft Senior Vice President, has said: "There is a substantive effort in open source to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property associated with that is available to Novell customers."
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by: 13 Jan 2009 13:31 |
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Of particular interest to ACT and its members are actions envisaged in the field of patents, better regulation, R&D and innovation. Many of the priorities mentioned in the work program are very much in line with the policies ACT believes to be beneficial for small and medium-sized IT companies in the EU. Concerning the patent reform debate, the Czech Republic has promised to continue efforts to improve the patent system. The only drawback to this promise is that it’s a bit vague, leaving the extent to which progress can be expected rather uncertain.
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by: 13 Jan 2009 13:04 |
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Sadly most of our thinking around legal protection of knowledge has been "derivative" in nature, a shoddy cut and paste job from the "mature IP systems" of the West. However, as the Bilski case shows, even these "mature IP systems" are having second thoughts on how they treat knowledge, or in this specific case, software patents. As I have argued in my previous blog entry, "The Practical Problem with Software Patents," the litigation-ridden path followed by US in granting software and business method patents is something we must avoid at all costs.
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by: 13 Jan 2009 12:58 |
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In this series of Industry Insights, I will look in-depth at the entire issue of software and patents. Software patents have been an issue of some debate in recent years. There are those who feel software should not be patented; others seek patents so as to protect their intellectual capital; and there are those who feel all software should be free. Before we talk about the possibility of patenting software, we need to know what we mean by "software". The word software is often used to mean music, video or other content that is made available for purchase or use, as opposed to computer software.
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by: 13 Jan 2009 12:31 |
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* Natural experiment: When software patents were affirmed, patenting increased, but innovation didn’t. * For some industries, on average, the standard logic of patents may be correct. In others, patents may harm innovation. * What makes some industries (e.g. software) different? Innovation is sequential, and research efforts are complementary. [Is that different than other industries?] * Standard logic: Patent holder can license to others, e.g. to subsequent innovators. So if use of a patent innovation is socially beneficial, the patent holder will license it and make money from it. Problem: patent holder is a monopolist — no competition — license fee will be too high. [Also: transaction costs?]
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by: 13 Jan 2009 12:25 |
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In the past I have send out more emails about software patents, Its simple software patents are bad. And in Europe there is a lobby from certain large companies that want to enforce there current position in the marketplace. In general for open source software such as Open Office, Firefox etc software patents are something which is not welcome... All software patents I have read so far are worthless. Yet the government approved monopoly. Especially when you live in Europe sign this petition: http://stopsoftwarepatents.eu/ And if possible put a banner on your website. And yes from a legal point of view the lobby from ffii.org and others was successful in putting a break on software patents. The European patent office may have handed out software patents. However with current legal framework in the European Union they are hard if not impossible to enforce.
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by: 12 Jan 2009 18:08 |
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Change the Courts 2006: Consultation BSA-EICTA: central caselaw 2006: EPLA Remove National Courts Replace by Central Court / Central Caselaw “We must moreover continue to attempt to harmonise the practise of granting patents for computer-implemented inventions at the European level. This is to be attempted by a common European patent court system (EPLA) in which the member states can voluntarily participate. Thereby a unified procedure and legal certainty are achieved.” —German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology / Central Caselaw “Baumann added that the new court was not intended to \"codify software patents\", but it was hoped it would provide better intellectual property protection for inventions with embedded software, such as mobile phones and satellite navigation systems.” — James Murray, IT Week
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by: 12 Jan 2009 18:07 |
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Even the modern controversy over the current effort of the Free Software Foundation to limit software patents through the General Public License Version 3 finds reflection in the earlier Cornwall experience. Familiar with the negative impact of the Watt patents on innovation, Cornwall mine engineers were reluctant to patent their inventions. From 1781 to 1852 Cornish residents took out a grand total of 15 patents on steam technology—against 994 patents on steam technology in all of England during that period. Will it surprise you to learn that the area with the fewest patents also was the area that contributed the most to the innovation and development of steam technology?
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by: 12 Jan 2009 18:04 |
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The second one, No. 5,412,717, is also credited to Fischer and was granted in May 1995. The invention deals with using hashes -- unique numerical identifiers -- to ensure an application has not been tampered with. IPAT is asking for a jury trial in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, where many companies choose to file patent disputes. IPAT seeks an injunction against the companies using the technologies and damages. Also named in the suit are companies AVG, Check Point Software, Comodo, ESET, F-Secure, Iolo technologies, Kaspersky Lab, McAfee, MicroWorld Technologies, NetVeda, Norman Data Defense Systems, Novell, PC Tools, PWI, Sophos, Sunbelt Software, Trend Micro, Velocity Micro and Webroot Software.
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by: 12 Jan 2009 18:02 |
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Are you tired of constantly being prompted to download proprietary software and plugins to play the videos and listen to the music you want? Are you fed up with seeing new gadgets that only use incompatible and restrictive audio and video formats? Did you know that it’s not a lack of technological know-how that causes this, but software patents and other legal restrictions? Increasingly proprietary software companies like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe are pushing video and audio formats that restrict access and restrict software developers, but there is an alternative that can be played on all computers without restriction—Ogg.
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by: 12 Jan 2009 17:59 |
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For a process to be patentable, it must involve a physical transformation to a different state or thing, or must be tied to a particular machine. What does that mean? The court gave examples indicating that software would be patentable if it represented physical objects undergoing physical transformation. However, it expressly reserved judgment on the alternative test: whether a general-purpose computer was "a particular machine." If so, of course, all software processes would be patentable. Not the brightest of lines, but the court didn't flinch from trying to draw one, despite arguments that patent lawyers would manage to circumvent any court-imposed limitations.
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by: 12 Jan 2009 17:52 |
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I cannot see how this invention is one that ought to be patentable, particularly given the recent decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in In re Bilski, which dealt a significant blow to the patentability of software and computer processes. Those familiar with the Bilski decision will recall that the Federal Circuit has now required that in order to protect software and computer processes we revert to what was done before the State Street decision, which is to focus on the machine and treating software as if it is not the invention but to patent the machine itself that has unique functionality thanks to some black magic provided by the unpatentable product (i.e., software) whose name cannot be uttered.
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by: 12 Jan 2009 17:49 |
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