News picks
Articles from other sources; copy title, first paragraph, and put URL in body of post.
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One example is the company's patent on a mouse wheel that can scroll up and down; another is its patent on double-clicking buttons. The company received its 5,000th patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office in March 2006, and is currently approaching the 10,000 mark.
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by: 10 Oct 2008 22:10 |
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Intellectual Ventures, Microsoft’s adjunct patent troll, has more than twice that number. Nathan Myhrvold seems to be planning a “tissue paper” (patents) crusade in countries and companies that may grow at Microsoft’s expense. There are attempts to deceive lawmakers to permit this to happen.
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by: 10 Oct 2008 22:08 |
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UK software developers will now have more rights over their projects following a ruling by the Court of Appeal which has brought the UK's approach to software patents in line with the rest of Europe. UK software developers had experienced more difficulty than other manufacturers in securing exclusive rights over innovations owing to the UK Intellectual Property Office's (IPO) interpretation of the law on software patents being more narrow than that of the European Patent Office (EPO).
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by: 10 Oct 2008 14:41 |
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The Court of Appeal has handed down a potentially far-reaching judgment concerning whether computer programs can be patented. The Court has ruled that Symbian can patent a program which enables computers to run faster and more efficiently. In what has been a fiercely debated topic within the software industry, the ruling may allow many more computer programs to be patented.
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by: 10 Oct 2008 13:08 |
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But the reason patents are especially bad for software is that software isn't some single invention where you can point to a single new idea. Not at all. All relevant software is a hugely complex set of very detailed rules, and there are millions of small and mostly trivial ideas rather than some single clever idea that can be patented. The worth of the software is not in any of those single small decisions, but in the whole. It's also distressing to see that people patent ‘ideas’. It's not even a working "thing"; it's just a small way of doing things that you try to patent, just to have a weapon in an economic fight. Sad. Patents have lost all redeeming value, if they ever had any.
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by: 10 Oct 2008 09:31 |
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After NetApp filed its lawsuit to halt adoption of Sun's open source ZFS technology, we responded by filing reexamination requests with the PTO citing the extensive amount of highly relevant prior art that was not disclosed or considered when NetApp originally filed its patents. The patent office clearly agreed with the relevance of this prior art, as demonstrated by its rejection of the claims across all of the reexaminations. Of these patents, three have been described by NetApp as "core" (US Patent Nos. 6,857,001; 6,892,211; and 5,819,292).
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by: 09 Oct 2008 15:12 |
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The IPKat thinks that, on first reading, the judgment does not appear to really change anything. However, the UK-IPO will inevitably now have to change its mind on how it deals with software patents, and will now be confronted with frustrated applicants who will have some serious ammunition to use against refusals under Section 1(2). The result of this decision will therefore have the effect (presumably desired) that the pendulum will be swinging back towards applicants for software patents in the UK, and away from those who would prefer to shut down the possibility of software being patentable in any guise.
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by: 09 Oct 2008 11:19 |
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US-based telecoms company Verizon Communications has lost its patent-infringement suit against cable TV service provider Cox Communications after a Virginia court ruled that Cox did not infringe on six Verizon patents related to internet telephony. Verizon had accused Cox of infringing six patents. It was seeking $404m in damages from Cox, citing a lawsuit it filed against Vonage Holdings in 2006 that it won last March when Vonage paid $120m in settlement costs, plus 5.5% in royalties on revenue.
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by: 09 Oct 2008 11:18 |
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With so many new tech applications and devices being invented every year, there are bound to be some patent lawsuits. But few of them name TechCrunch, the blog created by Silicon Valley bigwig Michael Arrington, as a defendant. It's a bit complicated, so bear with us. Earthcomber, a Chicago company that makes a location-based application for cellphones, recently sued Loopt, a company we wrote about briefly last month, for allegedly infringing its patents.
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by: 09 Oct 2008 10:17 |
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A scantly known startup out of Chicago called Earthcomber has filed a patent infringement suit against Loopt, a location-based social network. The suit claims that Loopt has infringed an Earthcomber patent, filed in June 2003 and issued in July 2006, that outlines “a system and method for locating and notifying a user of a person, place or thing having attributes matching the user’s stated preferences."
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by: 09 Oct 2008 10:15 |
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TeleCommunication Systems, a provider of wireless communications solutions, Wednesday announced the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued patent number 7,428,510 for "Prepaid Short Messaging." This TCS invention allows a mobile operator to provide messaging and information services to its prepaid subscribers using a method that prevents fraud and revenue loss. The invention determines if a subscriber has sufficient funds in their account to receive a short message and either delivers the message or prevents delivery of the message based on the account balance.
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by: 09 Oct 2008 09:30 |
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Here’s what Gates wrote in an office memorandum in 1991. “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. . . I feel certain that some large company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation, algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique.”
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by: 09 Oct 2008 09:28 |
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The Court of Appeal in London today confirmed that software can be patented if it provides a technical contribution to the state of the art
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by: 09 Oct 2008 09:24 |
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Q4. After Mono 2.0 was announced on Monday, I saw speculation in several Linux discussion sites that Mono is somehow a 'trojan horse' that, along with Novell's alliance with Microsoft, will somehow give Microsoft patent leverage over the Linux desktop. Would you care to respond? [...] The position of the Mono project has always been that we believe .Net includes a lot of innovation along with a good mix of well-known technology. So, if people found a patent infringement, we would take it out. [...] I wish people focused on what the actual problems are. I am certainly against software patents. It is not only Microsoft that owns software patents, but hundreds of companies. But, I think Mono is singled out, and people give a free pass to lots of other projects.
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by: 09 Oct 2008 09:16 |
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PA Advisors, LLC is an arm of Erich Spangenberg’s patent-holding empire. Its job is to assert U.S. Patent No. 6,199,067, which claims the use of user profiles in Internet search; it was used to sue Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and several other smaller players in November 2007. [full PA Advisors docket] On Friday, Law360 reported that the suit was dismissed against Facebook; and remarkably, a Facebook spokesman said that no payment at all was made to Spangenberg. That’s pretty unusual in a case brought by a patent-holding company.
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by: 08 Oct 2008 23:43 |
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Nine years after receiving the original patent filing, the United States Patent and Trademark Office has finally awarded Apple Inc, and inventor Steven P. Jobs the patent for the OS X Dock. The original patent was filed on December 20, 1999 and aside from Apple Inc, three inventors were listed on the file, Bas Ording, Lindsay J. Donald, and of course current Apple CEO Steven P. Jobs. The patent focuses primarily on the dock’s ability to magnify icons, and present information to the user when sweeping across the dock.
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by: 08 Oct 2008 23:02 |
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It took quite awhile, but Apple has finally received a patent on one of the most recognizable features of Mac OS X. The Dock--the panel that holds launchers for Mac OS X applications--has been deemed patent-worthy by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Apple first applied for the patent in late 1999, and AppleInsider notes the concept itself dates back to Apple CEO Steve Jobs' work at NeXT Computing.
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by: 08 Oct 2008 23:00 |
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Apple has received a patent for the dock utility for launching applications in OS X. Yes, the dock has been around for the better part of a decade, but Apple applied for the patent back in 1999 and didn't receive it until this week. The patent describes an interface for consolidating frequently used items in a "userbar." It also covers the way that items are magnified when you scroll your cursor over them.
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by: 08 Oct 2008 22:59 |
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is challenging a bogus patent on Internet music files that could stifle new innovations in online music distribution. Seer Systems was awarded this illegitimate patent for a system and method for joining different musical data types together in a file, distributing them over the Internet, and then playing that file. But in a reexamination request filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today, EFF and the law firm Day Casebeer Madrid & Batchelder show that descriptions of this technology were published a number of times before Seer Systems made its claim—including one in a book written by Seer's own founder and the named inventor of the patent, Stanley Jungleib.
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by: 08 Oct 2008 22:58 |
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New Delhi: UK-based telecom major British Telecom has filed a patent application in India for its invention computer telephony system, which could make a phone call through internet more secure, a development particularly more useful for call centres.
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by: 08 Oct 2008 17:17 |
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