Jacksparrow - ""

Apple Starts ‘Nuclear War’ in Patent Fight With HTC - "Apple filed a patent-infringement complaint against Taiwan’s HTC Corp. yesterday, seeking to prevent U.S. imports of phones that run Google Inc.’s Android operating system. The decision to take the case to the International Trade Commission signals that Apple wants to curb HTC’s market share gains as quickly as possible, said an expert."

The Prior Art: Inside Google's first patent trial - "Google's hard-nosed strategy for dealing with patent-holding plaintiffs gets put to the test -- and proves successful: late last month, Google won its first patent infringement lawsuit to go to a jury trial, in the Eastern District of Texas. The plaintiff was Function Media LLC, a patent holding company."

Economist: An end to frivolous patents may finally be in sight - "For society, however, the loss of competition through the granting sole rights to an individual or organisation is justified only if it stimulates the economy and delivers goods that change people’s lives for the better. [...] Instead of stimulating innovation, such [business method] patents seem more about extracting “rents” from innocent bystanders going about their business. [...] If truth be told, few inventions are really worth patenting. Time and again, surveys show that in both America and Europe companies rate superior sales and service, lead time and secrecy as far more important than patents when it comes to profiting from innovation. [...] Pursuing patents aggressively for cross-licensing agreements has little to do with encouraging innovation, though. Indeed, by increasing transaction costs, such deals are in effect a tax on innovation."

SD Times: USPTO likely to adopt 'peer-to-patent' - "Kappos said that the project “got a good level of interest. It got positive responses from examiners and the public. [The project's participants] found significant prior art, especially in non-patent literature. That's important in software, where so often it's not patented prior art. Our mission as an agency is to get the best prior art in front of examiners. There clearly is value [in the project].""

Kalow and Springut: Patentable Subject Matter After 'Bilski' - "The machine or transformation test is the current analysis that the courts and the Patent Office will take when considering whether subject matter is patentable. As both Bilski and Prometheus show, this question is not industry specific, but it is particularly important when an inventor is trying to obtain patent rights directed to processes. Because of the changing landscape, and the likelihood that whatever the Supreme Court does, there will remain unanswered questions about where the boundaries lie, the patent practitioner should always consider trying to claim processes both broadly and as tied to devices and/or causes one or more transformations."

The H: New Microsoft patent may put Linux security components at risk - "Microsoft has been granted a patent on a privilege escalation system which appears to cover the functionality of PolicyKit, which is used for fine grain authorisation on Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE and other Linux systems."

Groklaw: Microsoft Patents Sudo?!! - "It appears that Microsoft has just patented sudo, a personalized version of it. Here it is, patent number7617530. Thanks, USPTO, for giving Microsoft, which is already a monopoly, a monopoly on something that's been in use since 1980 and wasn't invented by Microsoft."

Ciaran O'Riordan: Bilski’s hearing and software patents - "At Monday’s hearing, neither party had the objective of abolishing software patents. The Bilski case is about a business method patent, so there was Mr. Jakes arguing that business methods should be patentable, and Mr. Stewart arguing that they shouldn’t. For software to be excluded, we’re relying on the judges (to whom we wrote an amicus brief, as did many others). There’re a few worrying statements, but there’s also a lot of hope."