Avistar Communications Corporation (Nasdaq: AVSR), a leading provider of unified visual communications solutions, today announced that it has been granted five new U.S. patents this month, including its 92nd patent, U.S. 7,441,001, covering services involving two or more real-time communications services such as text instant message (IM), video IM and Voice over IP (VoIP).
Thankfully, Indian judges need not venture down such a circuitous path. That a Bilski sort of invention is not patentable in India is crystal clear from section 3(k) of the Indian Patents Act, which prohibits a “business method” from patentability.
Section 3(k) also excludes “computer programs” per se and algorithms from patentability. In order to clarify the ambit of this exclusion, the government is currently evolving guidelines via a patent office manual; a process has spurred a fierce battle between proprietary software firms such as Microsoft Corp. and open-source evangelists such as Red Hat, which claim that the government is attempting to introduce software patents through the back door.
The open source community will be resting a bit easier - "abstract" patents, for business processes have been ruled out by the US authorities, at least for now.
Gardner explains that the Patent Bar should stand-up and explain to the PTO and courts that "the application of novel and nonobvious software to otherwise computer hardware is neither 'routine' nor 'typical.'"
FOSS lawyers see the decision as a good basis for changes to patent laws. They caution, however, that the software world will have to figure on increasing lobbying efforts from past patent seekers and "beneficiaries of the status quo." The Red Hat press release ends on a positive note with "We have a battle before us, but it is a battle we can win."
Of course, patent applications for many software systems will meet this test, and we have only minimal guidance from Bilski on how the test should be applied. However, SFLC believes that this decision takes us one step further toward freeing the United States from “software patents”. The SFLC hopes and expects that this case will lead to fewer patent grants that stand in the way of advancing software freedom.
Last week the Federal Circuit issued a major decision, In re Bilski, concerning the subject matter limits of patent law. The case presented questions relating to software patents, an issue of great significance to the free and open source software community, and so Red Hat filed a brief in Bilski to educate the appeals court about FOSS and its problems with the software patents. In the new opinion, the court cited Red Hat’s brief, but declined to settle the issue of when, if ever, software based inventions should be patentable. Even so, the new test in Bilski will probably limit the patentability of software. The war is not over, but the odds of success for FOSS just got better.
There probably isn't a single judge on this court who grew up with computers in his or her life. But look at their backgrounds a little more carefully, and you'll see that while they may not know what you know about tech, they are certainly highly educated and highly accomplished individuals in their area of expertise, namely patent law. Let's focus on those who wrote opinions, now.
The intellectual property community has been quick to begin the anticipation of a Barack Obama presidency in the United States following his election on Tuesday.
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“Obama’s regime is more likely to take the feedback from civil society into consideration and similarly more sceptical towards the pure business interests presented by Big Pharma, etcetera,” he said. “In the end, much will depend on what kind of persons Obama chooses to his cabinet for the key positions pertaining IP policy and global trade.”
Andrew Updegrove, an attorney at technology law firm Gesmer Updegrove in Boston who runs the open-standards blog consortiuminfo.org, said administration changes have little effect on US technical standards policy, since this sector is largely driven by industry - not government.
Note that Mr Lueders is a well-know[n] Microsoft & Software Patents lobbyist, who wants to raise a patent tax on every EU citizen who wants to access gover[n]mental documents via discriminatory patented standards.
The OpenParliament has also drawn the attention of other Microsoft drones ea[r]lier on.
Free software acknowledges that truth. Proprietary software does not. Instead, like the banks, proprietary-software vendors have had to justify the cost of their wares by constructing complex arguments about value.
Again, lipstick terms such as 'software patents' and 'intellectual property' have been applied so successfully they have entered the vernacular. Yet even a cursory examination of their real meaning shows them to be spurious. They exist only to perpetuate the dominance of monopolists.
Yes, we are living in a proprietary-software bubble and, like the bursting of the easy-credit bubble, this one is about to burst too — it's a matter of survival.
--Alan Cox to Eric Raymond