News picks
Articles from other sources; copy title, first paragraph, and put URL in body of post.
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Vesterdorf said that many critics believe the decision weakened patent law and the rights of patent holders to do as they wished with their intellectual property.
There was no doubt that the CFI had significantly enhanced the authority of the European Commission beyond its rulings earlier cases, he said, giving it "a wide margin of appreciation."
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by:  zoobab 1205412448|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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We work with the USPTO (Patent and Trademark Office) on patent quality issues. And we do that work to improve the quality of software patents and protect the platform. And then finally, we work on the standardizing the Linux platform.
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by: zoobab 1205408812|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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“It’s a myth that software is not patentable in Europe. In fact, the European Patent Office (EPO) issues software patents regularly. “Confusion arises because of differences in the European requirements for software patent applications compared to those in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). “Inventors and companies applying for patents on software and business methods need to ensure their application for a patent meets the very detailed European requirements or they are virtually guaranteed to fail.
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by: zoobab 1205408720|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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The other pillar is Software Patents, which is the legal mechanism they are embracing in order to perpetuate their monopoly. Alas, software patents are illegal in Europe and we must be alert on this because they are trying to see them passed in the EU (heavy lobbying behind the scenes to our elected representatives), so this is another field where FLOSS has to fight and fight hard.
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by: zoobab 1205346896|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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The vast majority of the respondents to this Question Of The Week were against the concept of software patents , and those that answered "no" answered with a great deal more fervor then those that said "yes". Among the reasons cited were a decided lack of expertise by the U.S. patent office, leading to costly and cumbersome litigation, that the very reason for the rapid growth of the games industry was due to a general lack of patents allowing ideas to be quickly built upon and refined, and that beyond stifling innovation, patents would be used to crush the "little guy." Also brought up was a large disparity in how patents are handled in the U.S. compared to Europe and Asia, where it is often harder to enforce certain patent rights.
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by: zoobab 1205256150|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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Increasing the business-led innovation performance of the European economy is crucial in order to compete in the global market. The Council recognises the need to implement the broadbased innovation strategy, including innovation in services, eco-innovation and non-technological innovation, and welcomes progress achieved thus far. It is necessary for the EU to find solutions for a patent litigation system and a Community patent. To this end, work will continue building on the progress report submitted to the Competitiveness Council on 22 November 2007. The Council also considers urgent the promotion of an EU-wide market for venture capital for our most innovative firms, together with taking measures to improve investment readiness and early-stage financing of SMEs.
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by: zoobab 1205242308|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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Unfortunately, many patents, even the ones that are legit, would have been created independently anyway. It's obviously a balance, but at least in the world I live in, I see patents getting in the way rather than helping me. I have never gone and looked at old patents to get new ideas for products. The only time an independent patent, one that I'm not working on filing myself, comes to my attention, it's because somebody is getting sued for infringing it. This tells me that we have lost the original goal that patents were supposed to foster.
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by: zoobab 1205237627|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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Patents expiring now would have been issued back in 1990, before the explosive rise of the Internet (though the Internet was actually being used at that point, nobody outside of academic and tech circles had heard of it). If you don't think that stifles product innovation, you have never tried to innovate. I have lived with this environment all of my career. I have made decisions in the past to navigate around bogus patents, simply because the lawyers told me it was a lost cause to try to challenge them.
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by: zoobab 1205232008|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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Lending a hand to issues around patents and standards, lobbyists are also involved in the process of making patent law and restrictions (e.g. requiring secret code for media playback). Watered-down bills and procurement which are not open for bidding are another serious issue. We saw plenty of this even in the ODF/OOXML debate, which ceased to be technical though it should have been all along.
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by: zoobab 1205161528|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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The problem with this argument is that it simply equates patents to innovation, which has never been true. In fact, if you look at the research you quickly realize that actual innovation is totally disconnected from patents. That's because the important part of innovation (unlike Tobak's claims) have little to do with invention and much to do with the process of making any technology more useful for the market. Patents don't help with that.
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by: zoobab 1205160780|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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Indeed, the End Software Patents project has pointed out that companies as diverse as the Green Bay Packers, Kraft Foods, and Ford Motors have been hit by software patent lawsuits in recent years. The reality is that software isn't just an industry, it's becoming a fundamental tool for manipulating information about the world. Policies that implicitly assume that only a few companies in Silicon Valley and Seattle are "software companies" are going to cause major problems.
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by: zoobab 1205160353|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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So if people are coding in your company, you probably should care about whether software can be patented or not. Indeed, it might be cheaper making a donation to the fight against allowing them in Europe than paying endless licensing fees to use them.
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by: zoobab 1205160260|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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T – Mobile, U.S. Cellular, Virgin Mobile USA and Helio have been sued by Intellect Wireless Inc. for patent infringement. The lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The Texas based company, Intellect Wireless, has accused the companies for infringing wireless image messaging patents. The three patents in question are “Picture Phone with Caller ID” “Method and Apparatus for Improved Paging Receiver and System” which were issued in 2007. The founder of Intellect Wireless, Daniel Henderson, is the sole inventor of the patents at hand.
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by: zoobab 1205160173|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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An MEP has written a question on the use of patented standards within public administrations. The position of the DG Enterprise is definitely to prefer RAND patented standards, and exclude free software from public administrations.
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by: zoobab 1205159986|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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But video games are now facing a new challenge when trying to build on past concepts: gameplay ideas are being patented. At first blush, patents on gameplay mechanics are a good idea; they allow the creators of these ideas to profit from them. The issue is that the patents are so becoming so broad, and so prohibitive to fight in court, that very basic ideas are being locked down by a few companies
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by:  ggiedke 1205138895|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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Last week German investigators raided 51 exhibitor stands at CeBIT, the German information technology fair in Hanover, looking for goods suspected of infringing patents. Some 183 police, customs officers, and prosecutors raided the fair on Wednesday and carried off 68 boxes of electronic goods and documents including cellphones, navigation devices, digital picture frames, and flat-screen monitors. Of the 51 companies raided, 24 were Chinese. Most of the patents concerned were related to devices with MP3, MP4, and DVB standard functions for digital audio and video, blank CDs, and DVD copiers, police said.
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by: zoobab 1205103256|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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The Federal Circuit's last question suggests that it may be looking to overrule, narrow, or just clarify its holding in the State Street Bank case. In other words, the Federal Circuit could be trying to rein in business method patents, perhaps by more concretely defining if and when business methods are patentable. Argument in the Bilski case is scheduled for May--we'll keep you posted as it develops.
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by: zoobab 1205090124|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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"There is a patent covenant for anyone that downloads [Moonlight] from Novell," answered de Icaza, who then acknowledged that "as to extending the patents to third parties -- you have to talk to Microsoft." This answer led Schroepfer to point out the inconsistency between having products that are called open source but are "patent-encumbered." "There are a lot of complicated IP patent-licensing restrictions," he said. "Even if you have open-source [products], you can't get the end result you're interested in."
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by: zoobab 1205086528|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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Open source software heavyweight and Novell vice president Miguel de Icaza this week publicly slammed the Novell-Microsoft cross patent licensing deal. De Icaza, a co-founder of the open source Gnome desktop project, joined Novell in 2003 when the big-N bought his companyl, Ximian. “I’m not happy about the fact that such an agreement was made, but [the decision] was above my pay grade; I think we should have stayed with the open-source community,” de Icaza said.
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by: zoobab 1205086300|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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In a nutshell, basically, the bill weakens patents across the board. The presumption is that, OK, we've got patent trolls, and we need to go and stop these guys from asserting weak patents against companies (to) gum up the works. In any ecosystem, there's always going to be parasites, and I consider patent trolls to be parasites. . . . But that doesn't mean you destroy the whole ecosystem to deal with parasites. . . . So the problem with the patent reform act, it just says, OK, we have a few bad actors, let's go and penalize everybody using patents, which is absurd. . . . What you need to do is find out what's not working and address those issues specifically.
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by: zoobab 1205086208|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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