Summary: No US patent reform last year, but there are improvements nonetheless, especially in the area of patents on algorithms
THE USPTO has amended its examination guidelines following an important ruling from SCOTUS, which at the very least limited the scope of software patents. Change came not from politics (driven dominantly and excessively by corporate money, especially in the US) but from a courtroom and The Hill continues the corporate media's obsession with patent trolls, who are not the same as software patents (despite some correlations).
"Heading into the year," writes
The Hill, "few issues seemed to be as well-supported as reforming the nation’s patent laws to prevent “trolls” from harassing companies with scores of lawsuits.
"A patent reform bill cruised through the House last December, and President Obama highlighted the issue in his State of the Union address as one of his 2014 priorities for Capitol Hill.
"Yet despite months of work from some of the Senate’s most senior lawmakers in both parties, the reform push was killed just before completion, at the request of Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)."
The problem with this approach is that it doesn't stop large aggressors like Microsoft and Apple from suing small companies using software patents. This approach is basically what large corporations are lobbying for. They have done it for years. This elusive pursuit of so-called 'reforms' that only affect small trolls isn't the thing to root for. Scope itself is the issue (scope of patents, not scale of the litigant).
Incidentally, there is
a decent new article about patents on genetics in the US. "Last month in Silicon Valley," writes
Technology Review, "biologists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier showed up in black gowns to receive the $3 million Breakthrough Prize, a glitzy award put on by Internet billionaires including Mark Zuckerberg. They’d won for developing CRISPR-Cas9, a “powerful and general technology” for editing genomes that’s been hailed as a biotechnology breakthrough." (further interpreted
by Glyn Moody)
This is about patents. As Moody put it, "Whether obvious or not, it looks like the patent granted may complicate turning the undoubtedly important CRISPR technique into products. That, in its turn, will mean delays for life-changing and even life-saving therapies: for example, CRISPR could potentially allow the defective gene that causes serious problems for those with cystic fibrosis to be edited to produce normal proteins, thus eliminating those problems. "
Speaking of patents on genes,
IP Troll Tracker correctly stresses that Monsanto deserves to be hated for its (ab)use of patents for monopoly. The post is titled
"People Hate Monsanto For Reasons Other Than Their Patent Litigation Policies?" One clear issue with this post is that it conveniently overlooks many other issues with Monsanto, including genocide in Vietnam (Agent Orange), the impact of toxins in pesticides, and the unknown impact of genetically-modified foods on one's health (several studies show a correlation to cancer, among other detriments).
Patents are inherently a monopoly and if monopolies are allowed to enter the field of software, where many people code with simple tools like a keyboard, then we limit expression. Code can be like prose and patenting prose (not the same as copyright) would be disastrous.
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