Funded by patent litigation firms, the glorified bill which patent maximalists promoted last week is already a thing of the past. Just like last year and the year prior to that. It's like an annual ritual and this time it's marketed as "bipartisan" because there are two (a couple) politicians from 'opposing' corporate parties behind it; they're not from oppositing sectors/interests, just a different letter on their lapel (the D/R duopoly). They're buying laws (but will fail, yet again, as before) by stacking panels and putting together a show.
"They're buying laws (but will fail, yet again, as before) by stacking panels and putting together a show."Judging by reactions in patent maximalists' blogs, we can more or less tell that expectations are low. They give it a shot, but even they realise that those Senate hearings were stacked. In "Two Observations on Last Week’s Senate Hearings on Patent Eligibility Reform" Gene Quinn (Watchtroll) has just said that the status quo is a "disaster". He's right. A disaster to patent trolls and parasitic law firms like his...
What they cannot deny, however, is that firms that actually produce things like the status quo a lot better and fully support AIA.
Senate members (other than Coons and his sidekick) can just look who's promoting the Coons coup (bill): literally the lobby groups of patent trolls and the politicians funded by their law firms. It's a form of corruption or bribery, but they prefer calling that "campaign contributions". Of course Michael Rosen of the American Enterprise Institute (a front group for extremists like Trump and platform for patent trolls) has just backed this Coons coup -- a coup against the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101. Seeing that inter partes reviews (IPRs) invalidate a lot of software parents, they just had to say something. Rosen had done this for years, typically citing the Koch 'scholars'. Bought, paid-for bills won't go very far. Who took the bill (invoice)? Follow the money of Coons. He has just hit the lobbyists' media and tweets that cite Coons are patent maximalists'. He's also boosted and amplified by patent trolls' front groups such as IAM (e.g. here and here). Not a single productive company is supporting this. As the CCIA put it in a tweet a few days ago: "The guy *whose patents were invalidated in Alice* thinks this is a bad, overbroad bill."
"...European Patents have got one heck of a crisis; the courts keep rejecting them again and again."The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is already attempting to water down or ignore 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101; that would have no impact on courts however. There are a couple new cases (in our daily links) wherein Federal Circuit judges throw out software patents. Nothing has changed!
Over here in Europe nothing is changing either, not at the courts anyway. Sure, there are software patents in Europe (wrongly granted by the EPO), but they won't withstand judges' scrutiny. Yesterday the EPO wrote:
Nearly 18 000 patent applications relating to self-driving vehicle technologies have been filed with the EPO in the last decade, almost 4 000 of them in 2017 alone. More interesting findings on #patents and self-driving vehicles here: http://bit.ly/SDVstudy #SelfDriving
The need to promote innovation through open source software (OSS) and a desire to protect patent rights may be contradictory interests for businesses investing in artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous driving