News picks
Articles from other sources; copy title, first paragraph, and put URL in body of post.
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I don’t think that there will be too many people at management level inside the EPO who would disagree with a proposition that some Administrative Council members do not necessarily have their main focus on what is good for the European patent system. Self interest has always been an issue when it comes to patents in Europe, as the Community patent negotiations have shown us time and again. However, not all Council members are the same. And the EPO management itself has frequently clashed with member states over a range of issues, including financing and sending EPO work to national offices.
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by: 16 Sep 2008 13:40 |
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Some of the biggest players in the technology industry complain that the U.S. patent system is broken -- putting too many patents of dubious merit in the hands of people who can use them to drag companies and other inventors to court. An experimental program aims to give the public, including inventors, more of a voice in the patent system. An experimental program aims to give the public, including inventors, more of a voice in the patent system.
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by: 16 Sep 2008 09:45 |
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The Patent Office reports that it has issued preliminary decisions on 40 of the 74 applications that have come through the program so far. Of those, six cited prior art submitted only through Peer-to-Patent, while another eight cited art found by both the examiner and peer reviewers... [I]n its second year, Peer-to-Patent is being expanded to include claims covering electronic commerce and so-called 'business methods'..."
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by: 16 Sep 2008 09:40 |
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100 T-shirts with the Red Dove and the Stop Software Patents slogan arrive tomorrow at the Brussels office, so pre-order yours! The previous yellow one is a collector now.
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by: 16 Sep 2008 06:43 |
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Thomas Klein took the legal view, but his claim has a strong business case as well. In a patents war, the startup is weak, and is constantly getting weaker. The larger companies have become patent machines. IBM is proud of its patent portfolio, and the fact that they produce patents at a rate of 10 a day. With such an extensive arsenal of patents, backed by unlimited legal funds – what chances are left for the VC backed company? This is like the US going to war against Micronesia.
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by: 15 Sep 2008 15:15 |
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"Our success in increasing the pace and breadth of our innovation was the driving force for identifying a more efficient and integrated system for managing InterDigital's patent portfolio," said Lawrence F. Shay, InterDigital's President of Patent Licensing. "We reviewed the different options in the marketplace and chose Anaqua. The new system will tie our invention and patent workflow processes together to provide a lifecycle record for each invention, allowing us to categorize our portfolio by any number of classifications and monitor related spending."
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by: 15 Sep 2008 15:07 |
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In the wake of free software leader Richard Stallman’s visit to New Zealand, state-owned radio network Radio New Zealand has begun delivering some of its shows in the Free Software Foundation’s favoured Ogg Vorbis format. [...] The Ogg format is not encumbered with software patents and is designed for efficient streaming. It is maintained by Xiph.org.
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by: 15 Sep 2008 15:02 |
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Heiner Flocke, president of an association set up by German small and medium-sized enterprises to protect their interests in patent affairs, supports SUEPO. He said in an interview that the weaknesses of the European patent system result mainly from the lack of patent quality and the resulting flood of patents. Speaking for the interests of small and medium-sized enterprises, he deplores the fact that "patents are increasingly being used tactically and as offensive weapons or as instruments of power – This abuse of the patent system is endangering many promising innovations by the small and medium-sized enterprises that are the backbone of the German economy."
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by: 15 Sep 2008 14:52 |
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An EPO spokesperson told heise online that the increasing number of patent applications does not mean that the world is coming up with more innovations. Rather, inventors and companies that already hold patents in one country are lining up at many other national patent offices to get patents for other markets. "If the decision takes time, the result is a period of legal uncertainty", a spokesperson explained.
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by: 15 Sep 2008 14:50 |
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One of the most irritating things about taking photos with a cameraphone is the stupid filenames they're given. Wouldn't it be much better to squiggle something on the back of the pic like you do with prints? Well, Nokia has decided this would be a jolly good idea and has filed a patent here in the USA for a technique that enables users of cameraphones or digital cameras to scribble 'back-of-photo'.
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by: 15 Sep 2008 13:40 |
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According to an EPO internal staff survey of June 2008, only 9% of the EPO examiners believes that "Brimelow and the Vice-Presidents actively promote patent quality". Brimelow is progressing, since Alain Pompidou, the former President, had a trust of only 7%.
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by: 15 Sep 2008 12:08 |
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A report has been completed. It says, the inventive steps required to qualify for patents should be considerable, and the resulting patents must be well defined, as to mininise litigation and maximise the scope for subsequent innovators. In particular software and business method patenting is an Australian concern.
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by: 15 Sep 2008 12:07 |
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In particular, they identify software and business methods as an issue, and state that large companies are using the patent system to build thickets that effectively keep competitors out of markets. The report then goes on to say that a major problem is that IP has been seen as a legal issue in Australia – and, therefore, one that should be left to IP owners and the legal profession. This approach is flawed, it believes. IP is primarily an economic issue, the report’s authors explain, and it should be viewed as such by the government.
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by: 15 Sep 2008 08:00 |
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I think that in most cases, open source projects should just ignore the patent system. Of course, if a particular patent is brought to your attention, you have to deal with it. But in almost all cases when you're dealing with open source, the best thing that you can do is to start publishing your source code, which is very conveniently done through the public CVS and Subversion and Git repositories that are out there. That is the easiest protection for open source projects generally. Now there are so many patents out there—particularly software patents. I once heard a licensing executive express the opinion that there's no large and substantial piece of software out there that doesn't infringe at least one patent. There's just too much stuff out there.
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by: 12 Sep 2008 09:39 |
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Klausner Technologies has gained new strength from its lawsuits against AT&T, eBay and Apple and after some court rulings in their favor, they are now taking on two bigger giants Verizon and Google. According to Klausner Technologies some of the tech in visual voicemail infringes on their patents. But it doesn’t stop there. They are also after Cox Communications, LG Electronics, Comverse Technology, Embarq, PhoneFusion, RingCentral, and Grand Central, which was acquired by Google last year.
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by: 12 Sep 2008 09:13 |
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Mark Chandler - senior vice president of legal services and general counsel of Cisco Systems - said that "technology companies all too often find themselves as defendants in patent suits". Is it a sign that software patents contribute negatively to the benefit balance of the patent system for software firms?
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by: 11 Sep 2008 09:41 |
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Knowles, Housel, and Mark Chandler - senior vice president of legal services and general counsel of Cisco Systems - agreed that if anything is to get done in the next Congress on patent reform, interested parties need to do more to come together on the more controversial issues. It is better for industries to hash it out themselves than let lawmakers muddle with the details, they concurred. "This is a sausage-making process" and whatever industry gets accomplished with the USPTO could look totally different once Congress gets done with it, said Chandler. "I certainly believe there's no one way to skin the cat and we should be able to find ways to work together toward more certainty in outcomes." Another problem with the patent system now, Chandler said, is that technology companies all too often find themselves as defendants in patent suits, and the number defendants being named in the suits has increased eight-fold in the last few decades.
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by: 11 Sep 2008 09:27 |
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It's been on the back of my mind for ages to check if the Peer to Patent project has an RSS feed for new patents added to the system. Today I actually noticed I'd written it on a TODO list at some point and since it would only take a second and my mind was already on it...I checked.
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by: 10 Sep 2008 09:44 |
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Intellectual property is also critical to the creation and successful use of new knowledge – particularly the 'cumulative' use of knowledge as an input to further, better knowledge. In this regard, particularly in new areas of patenting such as software and business methods, there is strong evidence that existing intellectual property arrangements are hampering innovation. To address this, the central design aspects of all intellectual property needs to be managed as an aspect of economic policy. Arguably, the current threshold of inventiveness for existing patents is also too low. The inventive steps required to qualify for patents should be considerable, and the resulting patents must be well defined, so as to minimise litigation and maximise the scope for subsequent innovators.
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by: 10 Sep 2008 08:09 |
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Is patent trolling the scourge of the universe or a valid business model? It’s an ongoing, emotion-charged debate in the high-tech industry. After failing to get Congress to pass a patent reform bill, some large technology companies have decided that if they can’t beat the patent trolls, they can at least use some of the trolls’ own weapons against them.
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by: 10 Sep 2008 07:53 |
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