04.01.19
Gemini version available ♊︎The Parasites With Their Abstract Patents Have Come to the Point of Attacking or Avoiding Actual Courts
Summary: Seeing that software patents lack actual worth in proper patent courts (unlike offices which gleefully grant these), the modus operandi has changed somewhat and law firms generally try to avoid judges, mock the system, cheat the system and so on
THE European Patent Office (EPO) seems like the last safe haven for software patents, along with China. We’ll tackle this in our next post.
After Alice the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) should just quit granting patents on software and business methods altogether. No patents should be granted knowing that courts would invalidate them (if there was a lawsuit). Sadly, however, based on yesterday’s ad from Patent Docs, today’s USPTO continues to peddle this nonsense. “The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will be holding the 2019 Business Methods Partnership Meeting from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm (ET) on April 2, 2019,” it says. “The meeting is an opportunity to bring stakeholders together to share ideas, experiences, and insights and to provide a forum for an informal discussion of many topics specific to the business methods area.”
“Agis sued HTC, a large Taiwanese developer and manufacturer of smartphones, for patent infringement.”
–MondaqWhy is it even being discussed? No such patents should be granted. Such bogus, abstract patents are also being challenged/questioned in Zimbabwe right now, but these should not be allowed, as they are inherently similar to software patents.
There’s this other Patent Docs ad about blockchain — the darling loophole for patenting software by pretending it’s a lot more innovative than it really is. As we noted in our previous post, today’s USPTO is simply misbehaving and a lot of its current leadership came from patent trolls and representatives of patent trolls, so maybe we should not be surprised at all. There’s this new roundup of lawsuits, which includes: “Agis sued HTC, a large Taiwanese developer and manufacturer of smartphones, for patent infringement. HTC argued that it was not subject to the Court’s personal jurisdiction because it had no contacts with the forum—all the smartphones it manufactured for the US market were imported by its US subsidiary and distributed in a manner determined by the subsidiary alone.”
We said we would not deal with pertinent cases this year, but the story of Agis was told some years ago; it had actually made something before it became a troll.
“HTC argued that it was not subject to the Court’s personal jurisdiction because it had no contacts with the forum—all the smartphones it manufactured for the US market were imported by its US subsidiary and distributed in a manner determined by the subsidiary alone.”
–MondaqFurther north, up there in Canada, The Liars’ Daily is inverting truths. Cameron Gale says that the “Patent office’s misleading messages about software may discourage investment,” but what discourages investment are patent trolls with software patents. “The government of Canada’s intellectual property (IP) strategy,” he wrote, “involves extensive efforts to educate Canadians about how IP tools, such as patents, can be used to protect their business assets.”
They’re neither property (as in 'IP') nor assets. Also, algorithms are rightly excluded from patentability. It’s pretty revealing that the pushers of software patents, notably lawyers, don’t get their way. Further east, in India, software patents are in principle not allowed, yet lawyers from LexOrbis keep misleading about it and lobbying to change that [1, 2]. They have just spread some more software patents propaganda, calling patents “innovation”, as usual. We recently saw many press releases about a software patent being granted in India; that does not, however, mean that courts would respect it. █
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