News picks
Articles from other sources; copy title, first paragraph, and put URL in body of post.
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Leave to appeal to the House of Lords was refused. It was observed that
before any such appeal it would be desirable to have available an opinion of
the EPO Enlarged Appeal Board. However, the EPO had not put in motion
any such appeal, possibly because it wished to have available a larger number of Technical Board of Appeal decisions before that step was taken. It is open to the Patent Office to apply to the House of Lords for the necessary leave.
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by: 13 Oct 2008 14:52 |
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The Court of Appeal decision in Symbian obliges the UK Patent Office to take a broader view of what is patentable.
Previously the Office considered software patentable only if it either solved a problem in the operation of a computer or produced a new effect outside the computer. For example, an application configured to run more rapidly because it used the computer’s resources more efficiently and economised on the memory would be refused as a computer program “as such”.
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by: 13 Oct 2008 14:50 |
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The Court of Appeal has refused to accept the UK Intellectual Property Office's rejection of a patent for a piece of software in a move which experts say will open the door for more software patents in the UK. Symbian has won the right to patent a piece of software which makes other software run more quickly. The Court of Appeal rejected the UK Intellectual Property Office (UK-IPO)'s objections to the application.
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by: 13 Oct 2008 14:48 |
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A second obvious problem with the EPO's interpretation is that it doesn't just render meaningless the exclusion of computer programs. It renders all the exclusions meaningless, so games, doing business, scientific theories, "rules and methods for performing mental acts" (yes, ways of using your brain), and all the other things listed in Paragraph 2 of Article 52 should be patentable. Which is completely absurd. Unfortunately, a UK appeal court has recently upheld this bizarre twisting of patents - and that article mis-reports the patent dangers as "protection" for software developers.
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by: 13 Oct 2008 14:46 |
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First in our round-up this week is the latest in the ongoing patent battle over the extent to which computer programs are patentable in the UK. We last reported on the Symbian patent issue back in March, with the High Court overturning the decision by the UK Intellectual Property Office to deny a patent to Symbian in relation to its hardware performance-enhancing software.
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by: 13 Oct 2008 14:44 |
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I'm not convinced the analogy holds, but it's something to think about in terms of recognizing how we've been seeing an ongoing patent bubble inflating pretty rapidly over the past few years. It's certainly nowhere near as big as the mortgage bubble, but it's still a pretty decent sized bubble, at this point.
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by: 13 Oct 2008 13:38 |
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It's been a while since we last looked in on the IP Innovation LLC v. Red Hat et al patent litigation. In fact, it's been exactly a year. The parties are deep in discovery, with trial set for April 12, 2010[PDF]. That could change, of course. But that's the date set. IP Innovation thinks the trial will take 3 days while Red Hat and Novell estimate between 7 and 10. It takes longer to defend yourself from a patent infringement accusation than to just throw one out there.
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by: 13 Oct 2008 11:10 |
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Although I've written elsewhere about the recent court case of Symbian v Comptroller General of Patents, noting that it was bad news, I hadn't realised quite how bad the news was until I went through the complete judgment. It's plain that the judges in question, who to their credit tried their level best to understand this mysterious stuff called software, failed to grasp the central issue of what software is. As a result, they have passed down a judgment that is so seriously wrong it will cause a huge amount of damage in the future unless it is revoked by a higher court.
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by: 13 Oct 2008 11:01 |
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Apple will not only use software, but also add new hardware to the devices to improve voice recognition. The company plans to use “voice-to-command-analyzer” that will decide whether to process an audio input as meaningless or request an action via the software. This technique will reduce false command input and will make devices respond faster to voice commands.
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by: 13 Oct 2008 10:49 |
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As per the patent, one of key components is a hardware component called "voice-to-command analyzer" which would determine whether the audio is meaningless or represents an action request. This would save other processors the burden of deciphering speech. After the voice-to-command analyzer determines that the audio represents an action request it triggers a macro manager, executing actions from a predetermined library.
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by: 13 Oct 2008 10:48 |
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World's largest mobile phone maker Nokia has filed a patent application in India for its networking solution which allows a user group to share multimedia contents during a group communication. Nokia, which is planning to launch its latest touch-screen mobile phone in India in coming days, has approached Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks for the patent.
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by: 13 Oct 2008 10:34 |
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The "Prepaid Short Messaging" patent describes a method and apparatus for tariffing a short message prior to being received by a recipient and determining if the recipient has sufficient funds to pay for delivery of the message. The recipient's account is debited prior to delivery of the short message and the message is delivered if the account has sufficient funds. If the recipient's account does not have sufficient funds, then the message is prevented from being delivered. An unsuccessful message can then be sent to either the sender and/or the recipient. The short message can originate from a subscriber, a mobile servicing center or an automatic message delivery option.
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by: 13 Oct 2008 10:32 |
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The Court of Appeal has refused to accept the UK Intellectual Property Office's rejection of a patent for a piece of software in a move which experts say will open the door for more software patents in the UK. Symbian has won the right to patent a piece of software which makes other software run more quickly. The Court of Appeal rejected the UK Intellectual Property Office (UK-IPO)'s objections to the application.
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by: 13 Oct 2008 10:06 |
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The Court of Appeal has refused to accept the UK Intellectual Property Office's rejection of a patent for a piece of software in a move which experts say will open the door for more software patents in the UK. Symbian has won the right to patent a piece of software which makes other software run more quickly. The Court of Appeal rejected the UK Intellectual Property Office (UK-IPO)'s objections to the application.
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by: 13 Oct 2008 10:03 |
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Inventions involving computer programs can now be examined and patented in the UK under a landmark verdict that ends uncertainty for thousands of freelance software developers. In its ruling last week, the Court of Appeal overturned the UK Intellectual Property Office’s refusal to grant Symbian a patent for its ‘novel and inventive computer operating system.’ The European Patent Office, which uses the same framework as the UK IPO, granted the application but the UK office rejected it for being ‘nothing more than a computer program.’
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by: 13 Oct 2008 10:01 |
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The court of appeal in England has ruled that companies should be granted patents for 'complex' software products. In this particular case, Symbian had written something that makes mobile phones run faster. The court case has received very little attention because of the bank crisis, but it can be appealed to the House of Lords and then the European Court of Justice.
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by: 13 Oct 2008 09:51 |
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The Court of Appeal has refused to accept the UK Intellectual Property Office's rejection of a patent for a piece of software in a move which experts say will open the door for more software patents in the UK. Symbian has won the right to patent a piece of software which makes other software run more quickly. The Court of Appeal rejected the UK Intellectual Property Office (UK-IPO)'s objections to the application.
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by: 13 Oct 2008 09:17 |
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Juxtacomm was formed in Canada in 1997 and claim they invented the ETL architecture described in the patent 6,195,662. A system and method is described for importing data from a source computer system, manipulating and transforming of that data, and export the data to a target computer system under control of a script processor using stored metadata definitions.
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by: 10 Oct 2008 22:58 |
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Software companies cannot win under the current patent system. A software product can be so complex that it can require hundreds of patents to cover everything that is unique about the product. If the company tries to file for everything they invent they spend a fortune on patent attorney fees and filing costs. If they don’t file then another company will “invent” the same thing and file and the original company can end up being threatened for patent infringement.
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by: 10 Oct 2008 22:53 |
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Facebook Dismissed from Search Patent Suit [The Prior Art] – - Facebook was dismissed from a lawsuit based on U.S. Patent No. 6,199,067, which claims the use of user profiles in Internet search. PA Advisors asserted the patent in a suite against Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and several other smaller players in November 2007. Facebook spokesman said that no payment was made in exchange for the dismissal.
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by: 10 Oct 2008 22:27 |
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