Posted in Site News at 2:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: An opinion and personal perspective on how the information people access is changing over time, and ever more rapidly with the emergence of the Internet
THIS post is not about the general evolution of the Internet or of publishing. It is based on a very personal perspective and it should be limited to anecdote, not historical evidence. To put it less vaguely, this is an attempt to explain how the passage of ideas — including those which one might put in a patent application — can (if not does) change over time.
Back in the days, people used the printing industry to spread their ideas, which needed to be clustered together into packages that make acquisition and transportation worth the cost. Books were very comprehensive pieces of work and some were a compilation of works, a medley of sorts. Books could also be shared between people, so for each manufactured book there was a travel time lasting decades if not centuries, each occupying days of one’s time (or several people’s time) at the expense of years of one’s work (assuming the book is well written and properly researched for).
“We no longer depend on travel to conferences, or at least not insist on those.”Academic journals are an interesting beast and nowadays they get grouped into sets which are sometimes sold under something like the LNCS banner (Lecture Notes in Computer Science). We no longer depend on travel to conferences, or at least not insist on those. We can find a lot of videos on the Web and download particular papers of interest (in abundance) off the Web, rather than ordering them by snail mail, then waiting for a long time for them to arrive (lag), alternatively having a subset of these stockpiled in libraries, which still require travelling to and they make copying of material (for reference at home) cumbersome, especially if one needs to chase all the bibliography. This world of journals and conference papers is still somewhat riddled by legacy conventions that make everything slow, extremely time-consuming, yet narrow in terms of scope (page limits constrain writers to publish just a tiny subset of their results, usually just the best ones). These papers, along with books that are often derived from these (by reuse), are still some of the best literature we have out there because these are written by experts in their fields — not journalists who try to help sell ads (akin to fiction writers and novels) — and they are peer-reviewed, then selected also in part based on reputation. Newspapers offer no references and sometimes also omit names of those involved in putting together a story. The model is trust there is lacking.
Nowadays, blogs are popular and increasingly — although there are exceptions — people find that they prefer microblogging for publishing (and for digestion) because it’s faster. It is also more diverse (more narratives per time unit) and quality control relies less on grammatical and structural assessment (which depends on repeated proofreading). Along with that there is a growth in social networks and sites where comments are massively shortened or even redacted. We live in a world of “bites” rather than “stories” and a lot of people start to get their information through platforms such as Facebook. It is far from ideal as it breeds trust in all sorts of junk ‘information’ (superstition, racism, etc.) and leaves the accurate reporting only to those who are patient enough (vanishingly small number).
“Along with that there is a growth in social networks and sites where comments are massively shortened or even redacted.”Speaking for myself, my history on the Web did in some way follow the trends above. Although I built my first Web site when I was 15, I started to get heavily involved in USENET around 2004 which is also the year I started publishing papers and giving lectures (I was 22 at the time) and even though I continued to publish in academic circles in years to come I found myself drifting towards blogging where the audience was large, the composition process was a lot more rapid, and most importantly there was constant feedback from both supporters and sceptics. In 2006 I started getting more involved when I joined Digg and became ranked 17th in the site (at the same year as joining) and later in the year I even got a job in the area (Netscape.com). Separately, I got involved in blogging outside my own site (schestowitz.com had published about 1,000 blog posts by that point) and notably I was involved in “Boycott Novell”. This really took off in 2008 and in 2010 Tim and I started forming an audiocast around our existing readers base (in 2011 we also experimented a little with video, which is very fast to produce). The increased interest in Identil.ca (and later on Twitter) was complementary to this because the main function of these sites is linkage to one’s items of interest, sometimes with an additional remark (140-character limit is… well, limiting). So here we are in an information cycle where messages are increasingly abbreviated (I have not bothered submitting papers to journals or conferences since 2006 when it was needed for me to get my Ph.D.) and attention moves away from long articles that can take writers days to prepare (this is how real reporting should be done). As for books, nowadays they are not sold but are rather than that “licensed” for digital use by one single person. Disgusting from the point of view of sharing information, but possibly acceptable from a business person’s point of view (and we all have DRM to thank for that).
What do our readers foresee as the future of information? We assume all information will eventually converge in digital form, even scanned and OCR’d in some cases, but what medium will dominate? Might professors start blogging more often than not? Will Open Access become the norm? Will Open Data become a pre-requisite for publication where results are reproducible and open to audit? Cablegate was a sort of example of Open Data/Open Access and it was fantastic for honest reporting.
At Techrights we continue to value spin-free writing that ignores the PR and really gets to the bottom of issues. █
Summary: The anatomy of biased-by-design article or a deconstruction of IDG’s hostility towards Linux
IT IS NO secret that we distrust IDG, which recently ran a 30-day troll-athlon against Ubuntu. It’s just one recent example among many and it is hard to decide whether to ignore them or rebut them because regardless, Google, for instance, syndicates that as ‘news’, failing to distinguish between news and blogs (opinion). The same problem exists in ZDNet and to a lesser degree in CNET.
I was recently invited for an interview over at www.muktware.com, which is a new site bold enough to challenge the corporate press. This interview might be published here at a later date. The site also asked me for comments on a one-sided IDG piece which spreads FUD against Android, using software patents of course (Microsoft loves those as a form of FUD these days). Separately, wrote that site, the court suggests that Oracle won’t be getting its way in the case against Google. While Groklaw continues showing this with its sound analysis, the pro-Microsoft press conveniently ignores. It pays attention only to gloom-and-doom predictions, which pro-Microsoft lobbyists are constantly amplifying. To quote:
Software patent troll Microsoft’s PR machine is pumping as much mis-information as it can, oracling Oracle’s victory in Android court case. The reality is, Oracle is facing one after other set-backs in the case. After USPTO’s rejection of a majority of Oracle’s patents, the court refused to buy Iain Cockburn’s report and asked both parties (Google and Oracle) to name two experts to verify damanges.
My comments regarding the FUD from IDG’s Nancy are posted below in full (sorry if they are crude, short, and full of typos, I am still catching up after spending all day yesterday in London).
The author of the article is a Microsoft proponent, but I would not use personal angle to counter the hypothesis of the article, which is good for Microsoft. The story about Oracle’s demands has been exaggerated. Just because Oracle, the plaintiff, asks for X,
does not mean that Oracle will get X, even if it wins. Based on what we know, one by one Oracle’s (formerly Sun’s) patents fall into the can following re-examination. At Sun, proponent staff admitted they played a bit of a game trying to see who manages to get the most ridiculous patent application past the USPTO (i,.e. accepted as a monopoly). Nancy writes, “If Oracle wins the lawsuit that it brought against the software giant, the consequences for Google and the entire Android market could be dire, analysts say.” But which analysts did she ask? Has she asked those who are unfitting to her headline? Has she contacted Mark Webbink or Pamela Jones from Groklaw? The first person she mentions is a patent lawyer. Patent lawyers would love to see patents upheld and commissions paid to them. This is a case of self-fulfilling prophecies. The analyst with Deutsche Bank mentions Oracle’s desires, which are merely desires. SCO too had desires and all it got was bankruptcy
“Oracle declined comment on whether it is asking handset makers to license its technology and did not comment further for this story. Google did not reply to requests for comment.”
Nancy could not get those involved to comment. Instead, she relies on mere spectators
“That licensing cost would make using Android comparable to the cost of licensing Windows Phone 7, Goldberg said.”
Has Goldberg actually tried the platform? It’s not competitive, some would call it a joke. It did not even support cut and paste until recently. The number of sales of this platform (licences really) is just a few millions. Google activates that many in about a week. While making gloomy predications for Android and hailing Windows as the Only Other Choice {tm}, Nancy quotes just a couple of people, one of whom clearly has a patent agenda. There seems to be a missing side — one that has not been includes in the panel, so to speak. That same one-sided piece also closes with such a conclusion/quote which leads mysticism that cannot alleviate FUD
She quotes: “So the perception would be that Google lost. Oracle will probably insist on [confidentiality] to be able to keep this posture, whether it’s justified or not.”
No.
The real dilemma here. Is not whether it’s secret or not. It’s whether Google will win the case or not. They present a false choice. And then at the end, this writer who covered Microsoft for years gives the impression that she only covers phones.
“Nancy Gohring covers mobile phones and cloud computing for The IDG News”
She ought to tell readers what company she covered for a long time beforehand. Based in Seattle (near Microsoft), I also notice that her latest two tweets are messages to pro-Microsoft lobbyist, Mr Müller, who enjoys attacking all of Microsoft’s competition, esp. Android as of late.
If she is getting her information from lobbyists, then no wonder the reporting is so poor.
This whole article (link omitted on purpose, although one can find it based on quoted text) is not unusual, it’s characteristics of IDG’s spin zone. We need to continue pressuring IDG, which we previously called the Fox News of IT. IDG’s business model is attracting advertisers and clients for ‘reports’ (Linux does neither); it is not in the business of actually reporting accurately and the objective of articles (‘content’) is merely to attract crowds into the ads and make clients of IDC happy(ier). █
Summary: A look at the patent attacks from Microsoft and why they have not been as effective as Microsoft and its lobbyists wish us to believe (for FUD factor)
In a decent blog post from Christine Hall she explains that Microsoft has become a patent threat not just to Android. It had already signed deals like the one with Novell in order to create what Christine (of FOSS Force) calls the “Microsoft Tax on Linux Devices”. To quote:
The desktop and laptop might be safe, for the time being, but now the evil empire has dug its talons into the mobile world. It’s becoming nigh near impossible to purchase a device running Android or Chrome OS without a hidden Microsoft tax, and the makers of smartphones and tablets probably won’t be offering devices with no operating system installed in the near future, for those of us who’d prefer to install our own OS and skip having any of our money shipped to MS.
The new Microsoft tax is in the form of patent licenses that OEMs are being blackmailed into paying by the Microsoft folks. Yep, MS is finally making good on its promises to enforce the patents it claims are being violated by Linux by going after the makers of devices running Android (and now, evidently, Chrome OS). Does Microsoft actually hold valid patents being infringed by Android? Who knows? That would be for the courts to decide and, so far, nothing’s gone to court. OEMs are just ponying up and buying MS licenses on the strength of Microsoft threats. So much so that Redmond is evidently making more money on Android than on Windows Phone 7.
Here in this site we have been keeping an up-to-date list of companies that pay Ballmer for the ‘right’ to sell products with Linux. We urge people to avoid those companies and send out the message that taking this shameful route is unwise for business. Companies tend to consider what’s good for business, not what’s good for ethics, although poor ethics sometimes — provided public awareness — affect business.
Microsoft is clearly failing to sell its products, so when it cannot ram them down people’s throats (as it does by bribing colleges and offering kickbacks to OEMs) it will try to make money from the competition’s sales. If someone still believes that Microsoft is doing alright against Linux, share this this new article from a ‘news’ site paid by Microsoft. It quotes Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer as saying that “In a year, we’ve gone from very small to [...] very small.”
Hilarious.
“Google’s Android operating system remains No. 1 in the U.S.,” notes the Microsoft-sympathetic reporter, “while Windows Phone lost ground, according to the latest comScore report. The Windows Phone 7 launch last fall has not stopped Android’s rise. Microsoft had almost 8 percent of the U.S. market in the past three months, down 1 percent…”
Mr. Pogson notes that among the big players that sell Android devices Microsoft has gotten just about nobody to pay for unnamed patents, except HTC. To quote:
The Open Handset Alliance has 20 members who make handsets: Acer, Alcatel, ASUS, CCI, Dell, FoxConn, Garmen, Haier, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, Sharp, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and ZTE.
Several manufacturers using Android have entered licensing agreements with M$: Wistron, HTC, General Dynamics Itronix, Velocity Micro, and Onkyo. M$ is reported to be demanding $15 a copy for Android/Linux from Samsung and Barnes and Noble has gone to court over the issue. It is interesting that M$ has apparently secured royalty payments around $5 per copy while demanding $15. Thus it seems that some are paying M$ to go away. Others will fight.
Microsoft is mostly going after those without incentive to fight back. It uses software patents against them, rather than offer them something like Windows. That alone speaks volumes. Pogson ends by adding:
Making software is not a creative act and software patents are not stimulating innovation, it would seem. Software is a data structure and an algorithm, nothing more nor less. Once the information in the specification of those two elements is defined, the software follows and it can be created by almost any programmer skilled in the art. Thus, it fails non-obviousness. The information in the specification of the data structure and algorithm is not patentable, being merely an idea without physical embodiment. Putting software in a computer may give it physical embodiment but it is still obvious how it works when one looks at the source code.
And don’t cry for Microsoft. While its new mobile OS rise has yet to be a rise at all, the company is making money on–get this–Android patent enforcement. That is, by dint of its thousands of software patents, Microsoft has succeeded in getting the likes of HTC to pay license fees, and now it’s going after Samsung. Cue the jokes about blue screens of death in outer space.
In a research note, Wells Fargo estimated Windows Phone 7 revenue of $500 million in 2011; and more than $1 billion for Android licenses in 2012 if it charged $10 per license.
Microsoft continues destroying the software industry, substituting it with lawyers and ruthless businessmen. It is not just bad for developers, it is bad for everyone (who sees product prices elevated due to bureaucracy fees/costs). The word “innovation” lost its meaning (we covered thisrecently and even years ago) and now it is used to justify decreased competition, retarded products (which have features removed due to patents), and increased collusion (which is a form of crime that regulators rarely address because it is done by corporations to people rather than the other way around). █
Summary: Yet another call for Google to fight against the Great Patents Cartel rather than find ways of joining this exclusionary club
IN A NEW article by Dr. Glyn Moody exists a rather eloquent explanation of why Google should quit trying to play with patents and instead just put an end to software patents, despite the advice it receives from its self-serving patent lawyers. Moody explains that “Android is under serious threat”. But as he immediately points out, “Techdirt’s handy diagram illustrates, practically everyone in the smartphone space is suing everyone else. But the big difference is how the others are addressing this.
“Some are cutting deals among themselves, such as the recent, if still rather mysterious, one between Nokia and Apple. Others, with less in the way to offer in exchange, are simply coughing up licensing fees. Worryingly, that includes an increasing number of Android manufacturers.”
The summary of this which appears in Slashdotsays:
“When challenged directly by Oracle over Android intellectual property, Google has proven itself a feisty opponent. So why is it sitting back and letting Microsoft shake down OEMs over its claims to own patents that Android infringes? A disheartened Tom Henderson thinks it’s because Microsoft has been smart to go after the vendors rather than poke at Google directly. Still, he wonders when Google will get into the fight.”
Can we be persuasive enough, even to the point where the PR factor will compel Google to join campaigns such as “End Software Patents”?
Apple has ratcheted up its attack on Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC, filing a second patent-infringement complaint that, if successful, could bar HTC products from being imported into the US.
The complaint was filed with US International Trade Commission (USITC) on Friday, Bloomberg reports, and was revealed in a brief notice on the USITC website.
I some cases, Apple and Google are both targeted at the same time by patent trolls. To use a similar new scenario (more in Bloomberg about software patents used in reverse), sometimes Microsoft and Google share this pain too. What’s more interesting though is the increased collusion among Apple and Microsoft, which sometimes even congratulate one another on patent strategy, having cross-licensed for a long time, then taken Novell’s patents, and most recently taken Nortel’s patent although that is currently being challenged by federal investigation, as we noted twice before (in the US and also Canada).
The answer, as every patent litigator in the US knows, is Google. It is the only one not in the consortium buying a portfolio of thousands of technology patents from the bankrupt Canadian firm Nortel Networks.
The winning consortium comprised the three big operating systems firms plus Sony and Ericsson, handset makers, and EMC, a data storage firm. It called itself Rockstar Bidco, though it might as well have called itself Everyone But Google Inc.
Android may be winning more ground than any other type of smartphone in the battle for consumer loyalty, but on a parallel legal battleground, Google just found itself surrounded by heavy artillery. The outcome of the auction represents the largest competitive threat to Android since its 2008 launch and threatens to derail its sensational growth.
This is the sort of thing that would happen to desktop GNU/Linux too as it grows bigger (Google has just released statistics showing a growth of 15% year-to-year). Not only “commercial” distributors like Canonical are affected. Based on this new move from Debian, such a decentralised project too is concerned and as the British press puts it, “[t]he Debian Project, which is best known for the Debian Linux distribution, has served up the Community Distribution Patent Policy FAQ, a document that tries to explain patents and patent liabilities in plain English for developers working on FOSS projects. The information was prepared by lawyers at the Software Freedom Law Center and it applies to US patent law.”
Of course, many Debian developers are based outside the US, so these ludicrous laws do not apply to them, except when they distribute their software in the US (which is a large market overall). We really need to eradicate this problem at the root and without support from a billionaire company like Google it would be hard to abolish software patents. Intel and IBM are a lost cause in this regard because, although they support Linux for parts of the business, they actively lobby for software patents and they haven’t as much to lose from them as Google has. Google’s door is therefore the right one to knock on. But it’s important to be diplomatic and polite about it. █
Summary: Nichi Vendola faces a new PR disaster, so the ethics of Microsoft boosters like himself are pondered
IS THERE a correlation between proprietary software agenda and sociopathy? Or putting it less negatively, can Free software be shown to have a correlation with those favouring social solidarity? The answers would rely on generalisation and there are always exceptions. The notorious traps of induction and deduction can lead proponents of each side to being chastised. Those who say that all GNU/Linux users are freeloaders (price) or are communists (opposing uneven distribution of wealth) are rightly receiving flak. It could be argued that Microsoft — and to a lesser extent Apple — is “communism” for taking away choice. Well, many Windows users are always after ‘free stuff’, which is sometimes used illegally (should one call them “pirates”?). Based on the donation- or contribution-based indie games model for spreading games we actually find that GNU/Linux are willing to pay the most and support the developers best. The distribution model is one thing, standards compliance is another, and then of course there are also business practices (e.g. bribes, collusion, SLAPP). Perhaps the most important point to make here is that generalisations often fail and they are highly dependent on perspective. The same insults Microsoft uses against GNU/Linux equally well apply to Microsoft, if not more so. So when Microsoft, for example, accuses Free software of using zero-cost distribution to compete, bear in mind the very recent news about Microsoft paying a college a quarter of a million dollars to impose more Microsoft on students. This is negative pricing, and in turn students are kept captive. It’s vicious and definitely unfair (maybe illegal, but the laws are very loosely enforced against large corporations).
To use an anecdote of Microsoft apologists (e.g. in education), recall the tales of Vendola [EN | ES] and mind this news from Italy:
At the end of 2010 Nichi Vendola, leader of the Left, Ecology and Freedom party and governor of the Italian Region of Puglia became a hot topic among the Italian Free Software Community for presenting, almost in the same day, a regional law for promotion of Free Software AND a partnership between Puglia and Microsoft, a company not exactly known for loving Free Software.
Very soon both news, though interesting for what they revealed of Vendola’s way to handle communication, were forgotten, for obvious reasons: Italians have plenty of much more urgent and understandable problems to worry about while Vendola is, I presume, much more concerned with what to do at the next political elections (he’s a likely candidate for the Prime Minister post) than with regional regulation of software.
This morning, however, the topic came back because Vendola announced in a press conference that that law proposal was approved one month ago by the Regional Council.
It’s interesting to see how this announcement was presented. To begin with, several “official” media outlets, for example Il Paese Nuovo and BariLive, copied word by word all or part of the official press release from Region Puglia without saying at all it was a copied press release or linking to the online source.
This probably brings us back to the question about the things we can learn about Microsoft apologists, based on anecdotes. In the example above we see yet more of that pattern of shameless copying without attribution — the same sort of pattern we see a lot of at Microsoft (we gave many examples over the years) and a lot of Windows users. In GNU/Linux, copying is usually done legally and even encouraged. The smear which is hard to just get over is that, according to Microsoft, Linux is a cancer that disrespects so-called ‘intellectual’ ‘property’. The reality is exactly the opposite if tackled from another angle. In GNU/Linux we share knowledge, respecting this so-called ‘property’ of society and sharing intellect among ourselves for the benefit of education. Microsoft, on the other, impedes sharing of knowledge, choosing collusion and litigation instead. What does that really tell us about Microsoft? We’ll address Microsoft’s thuggish behaviour in the next few posts. We really need to reverse Microsoft’s propaganda and have people see that it ought to be used against Microsoft (and Apple), not for it. █
Posted in IBM, Patents at 11:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
No change, just a lot of words
Summary: The head of the USPTO, David Kappos (above), speaks about the system he now has a lot of influence over. With a fine-tooth comb, the FFII’s president runs through his words.
THE COMPANY behind silent PR and silent lobbying for software patents has had one of its people arrive at the USPTO’s throne while another created the OIN, which in some sense legitimises software patents (it is a double-edged sword, but not so much for IBM). IBM is in favour of software patents because it has so many of them. Kappos himself belongs in the patent lawyers community, those who are leeches to software developers, they are very rarely developers themselves.
“The open source development model is absolutely fantastic,” says Mr. Kappos in this interview, but it goes downhill from there. Let us see how it starts:
Mm hmm. Yes. Software innovation in the open source area has been wonderful, and it has been a breakthrough business model. And great pieces of software, like the Linux operating system, as an example, have revolutionized much of what we do and are the basis for much of our computing on the Internet. The open source development model is absolutely fantastic.
Right. And what’s incompatible with this business model? That’s right, software patents. So it gets ruined from there on whenever Kappos talks about patents. The FFII’s president (Benjamin Henrion) did a fine job picking out the bits where he falters, such as the point where he says:
No matter what the field, whether it’s biotechnology or mousetraps or wheels, gears and sprockets, software
These are entirely different things. Why even lump them together? As Henrion explains:
Kappos uses the hardware equivalence to make software patentable
Henrion adds that according to “Kappos: [it] certainly does not discriminate against any model of software development so that the marketplace can decide” (really?).
“Kappos thinks patent trolls are OK,” Henrion writes, “companies that buy and assert patents are essentially market-making mechanisms” (he must be joking or he is very thick, but it’s likely that he is neither of those things).
“He is probably surrounded by persuasive lawyers, not truly practising staff — those who are busy making actual products, not writing patent applications.”As long as the USPTO is run by a bunch of lawyers with vested interests (like Kappos with his loyalty to a software patents supporter, IBM), all that this US government supports is a small set of mega-corporations sustaining law which is, by design, discriminatory towards the population at large (see the video below).
To end with a quote from Henrion, “Kappos: so I actually don’t see any sort of major change in the area of software patenting” (amazing nonchalance!). IBM could use some prodding and so could Kappos, who has a blog where people who read Techrights can speak to him very easily and directly, hopefully politely speaking some sense into his mind. He is probably surrounded by persuasive lawyers, not truly practising staff — those who are busy making actual products, not writing patent applications. We never insulted Mr. Kappos and in fact we supported his appointment at the time, falsely believing that this was the man who would bring positive change. He failed us all very, very badly.
Professor Lessig, a shrewd American who opposes maximalists of so-called “IP”, gave the following topical talk some days ago (TinyOgg will indefinitely terminate within 4 days, so we apologise for Flash-only video). █
Summary: “Antitrust officials probing sale of patents to Google’s rivals,” reports the Washington Post, naming action from the American Antitrust Institute (AAI)
IMPORTANT news comes from the Washington Post which suggests that, just as CPTN got scrutinised by the USDOJ, so will the Nortel sale, at least potentially (the AAI has made a start):
The sale immediately raised concern among some antitrust experts. This week, the American Antitrust Institute sent a letter to the Justice Department asking antitrust officials to begin an investigation of the sale ahead of Nortel’s bankruptcy proceedings, set for Monday.
Canadian regulators too are looking at this, so we need not assume that the patent sale is final. Maybe the regulators will defang the buyers by adding a condition such as, “these patents cannot be used offensively.” We saw CPTN facing some barriers tied to the GPLv2.
In our latest daily links we included 2 links that show how Android is growing at the expense of the iPad, share-wise. Apple and Microsoft would love to stop this rapid growth and the only method they have left is the last resort of patent offensives. █
Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: “Spain, Italy file actions for annulment of unitary patent protection in EU’s Court of Justice,” Techrights has learned (documents now available)
IN OUR many past writings about software patents in Europe we named specific politicians whose role seemed to be the promotion of foreign interests for foreign monopolists. Some years ago it was Charlie McCreevy and these days it seems like Barnier carries the baton of shame. We wrote about him here, here, here, here, and various other places. Recently, as described here, even French groups started to expose Barnier (a Frenchman) for his insidious agenda which he masks as “union” “harmony”, “unitary”, and several other euphemisms in this whole tiresome shuffle-spiel. Don’t believe them for a second. They are politicians, and they are pushing an agenda using whatever lies and wording gets the job done for their clients. In this case, the job can also usher software patents into Europe and — in turn — the rest of the world (which mostly must comply with the West due to old-fashioned sanction games).
Based on this informative tweet, “Spain, Italy file actions for annulment of unitary patent protection in EU’s Court of Justice – http://bit.ly/npZ7mm http://bit.ly/rqlmgA ”
“To have software patent trolls in the UK would be the rare exception.”We have made local copies of these documents for future reference (document 1 [PDF] and document 2 [PDF]). This is not the first time that Spain and Italy take the lead on this subject (see the wiki archive), but this time they make it more formal.
Meanwhile, here in the UK, one of the Peer to Patent people (whom we do not fully agree with following their arrival at a country without software patents [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]) promises that “[n]ext week, I will discuss the exclusion for computer programs and methods of playing a game, doing business or performing mental acts.” Well, in the UK it was hardly ever a subject of discussion until Symbian (Nokia) did its messy thing, as we covered several years ago. The UK does not really need a debate on the legality of software patents because these patents are, in principle, still outside the remit of the law. Even if they accidentally get granted, this does not mean they will stand in the courtroom. Caselaw basis defends software developers for the most part. To have software patent trolls in the UK would be the rare exception. It provides an incentive for people to develop in the UK and no incentives for patent parasites like trolls and hoarders to be based in the UK. When British developers get hit by a software patent lawsuit (which sometimes happens), it usually comes from a US-based patent troll, likely based in Texas. █
