Posted in Law, Patents at 5:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Will today’s students become producers or paper pushers?
Summary: How the patent system, controlled for the most part by lawyers, raises a generation of leeches rather than a generation of engineers
WE VERY often emphasise the fact that the patent systems’ main cheerleaders are patent lawyers. Well, Tim has just published a thought-provoking article that starts with a very suitably rhetorical question: “Does Innovation Revolve Around Patent Lawyers?” Here are some bits from his analysis:
A patent attorney named Daren Gibby was kind enough to send me a copy of his new book Why Has America Stopped Inventing? As you’d expect from a book written by a patent attorney, it’s a pretty strongly pro-patent book. I didn’t expect to agree with the book’s arguments, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to engage with the “other side” of the patent debate.
The bulk of the book is a meandering narrative about America’s great inventors—Eli Whitney, Samuel Morse, Charles Goodyear, and many others—and their struggles to enforce their patents against infringers. Whitney, for example, almost completely failed to prevent infringement of his cotton gin patent, and as a consequence made very little money from his invention.
After a few chapters, I began to wonder what the point of all these anecdotes was. After all, the book bills itself as an explanation for America’s alleged decline in innovation. But it wasn’t clear what these blow-by-blow descriptions of the patent enforcement efforts of great 19th century inventors had to do with the modern patent system. Indeed, aside from some hand-waving about the lack of cancer cures and flying cars in chapter 1, the book never makes a serious effort to substantiate the claim that the pace of American innovation has slowed down.
“Here’s a post explaining that proprietary codecs drive up the costs,” wrote to us a reader today. It’s a tax on ideas and here is one way to tackle it along with Phoronix‘s analysis.
The first three adhere to the standard Linux library API’s, so should be a straight forward swap in for applications that use them. OpenMAX IL does not have a standard API at this stage, so is a custom implementation. All these libraries are as supplied by Broadcom, the SoC (System On Chip) provider.
We’ve seen this before, but here it’s a modern example: work simply wasn’t done on many of these efforts in part because there was no competition. And, in fact, there are still a few patents that really do hinder things, and this is a problem. Considering just how much good these 3D printers can do — especially as they provide more power, do multi-color, and a variety of other features, it kind of makes you wonder just how much we’ve lost by having tons of researchers just sitting on their printer projects out of a fear of getting sued.
Separately, according to some “legal” blog, US judges (“legal” folks) permit software patents. To quote:
Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court spoke on patentable subject matter in Bilski v. Kappos, 130 S. Ct. 3218 (2010), Federal Circuit panels have taken a variety of approaches to the subject. The latest approach is seen in Dealertrack, Inc. v. Huber, No. 09-1566 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 20, 2012). It brings back the notion of preemption as a test for patentable subject matter (also known as patent eligibility). The notion of preemption was briefly touched on in the original In re Bilski opinion, 545 F.3d 943 (Fed. Cir. 2008) (en banc).
This is a European blog. The lawyers in Europe wants software patents simply because it means more business to them, at the expense of buyers of products and engineers themselves. The Bilski case , like all cases, was decided on by lawyers, not scientists, so it is not surprising that they expand their own territory at the expense of producing industries.
As it prepares for one of the biggest IPOs ever, Facebook is coming under the same fierce attacks being waged against other big technology companies: patent lawsuits.
Facebook itself is also launching patent attacks. Going back to Wipro (a closeMicrosoft partner like Facebook, but from india), its new patents are leaving room for doubt. Another Microsoft partner, Questthe villain,
gets a patent and brags about it. To quote: “Quest vWorkspace 7.5 delivers low cost desktop virtualisation via patent-pending scalability enhancements, direct Hyper-V integration, fast provisioning, and advanced desktop virtualisation load balancing and provides direct support for Microsoft Hyper-V, including FREE Microsoft Hyper-V Server.”
Fiserv this month filed a lawsuit in federal court against rival IBM i banking software provider Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) and its Metavante subsidiary over alleged violation of its patents relating to online payments. The alleged violations involve patents held by Fiserv’s subsidiaries, CheckFree and CashEdge, that describe online financial activities, such as conducting account-to-account transfers, creating electronic transaction “pick lists,” and making payments on behalf of others.
Not that it was simple to create. The research began more than a year and a half before USF applied for the patent in 2006. It arose from a project on people’s transportation behavior.
Melbourne-based researchers are looking to commercialise a search algorithm that analyses networks to identify the most easily exploitable vulnerability chains.
One last example shows us that software patents are out of control in the US and as long as lawyers run the system (politicians and judges) we are unlikely to see much change, only change for the worse. Here is what seems like business methods. Bilski didn’t help much, did it? It’s business as usual. █
Summary: Bits of important news from Australia and New Zealand, less so from Europe
IN THIS status quo of “patents as products” we keep hearing about patent-pending hype/bragging rights from incognito companies. They do not always have products, but they sure have pieces of papers with an idea on them. The situation is worse in the States than in most other countries and Australia, for example, still has activism fighting the issue:
When it comes to software patents, Melbourne developer Ben Sturmfels is sure of one thing: his campaign to end them in their entirety will succeed in the long run.
[...]
Though he is a free software advocate, Sturmfels campaign against software patents extends to all genres of software. Patents can affect proprietary software as much as they do free and open source software, he pointed out when I met him recently.
In February, Sturmfels’ petition was accepted by the government’s Petitions Committee, in three batches. “Collecting 1000 signatures on paper is a hard task and a huge one in terms of the amount of paper needed,” he said with a grin.
More recently we saw some similar activism in New Zealand, where there is a danger that the “Software patent law in New Zealand [might] be overhidden by the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA).” Here is another article about it which says: “A pending international trade treaty could override a recent New Zealand law change that excluded software from patent protection.
“All the political parties supported the controversial change. But the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) could see the US pro-patent view override our local law makers.
“Last month, I met Trade Minister Hon Tim Groser and the government’s chief trade negotiator to get the inside word on what was happening with the TPPA, particularly in relation to technology and intellectual property (IP).
“Mr Groser’s openness and candour was excellent and I can’t speak highly enough about the minister’s willingness to engage and discuss these issues.”
The situation in New Zealand has been eerily similar at times to the situation in Europe — a situation so depressing that we prefer not to write about until after Christmas.
Watch how some people are treating patents like property. To quote a new example:
The Government has published draft legislation for its Finance Bill 2012, which includes draft measures aimed at creating improved conditions for business investment and growth in the UK. The proposals include a new tax scheme intended to reduce corporation tax for profits arising from patents, dubbed the “Patent Box”.
“Law” sites keep promoting software patents in the UK, under seemingly innocent titles. We are going to address software patents in Europe in a later series of posts later in the month. We need to do some activism to defend European software developers from the bureaucrats, paper-pushers, and multinational monopolists. █
Posted in Law, Patents at 9:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
[written in 05/12/2011]
Summary: A few more examples of notable figures that grew tired of the patent system as it stands, especially in the United States
EARLY in the month Russia Today interviewed Richard Stallman. We saw some very good answers from Stallman, even to seemingly hostile questions.
One article which was written around the time of the interview concentrated on Stallman’s take on patents. To quote: “Muktware: Do you think USA is becoming hostile to innovation and competition as the companies like Apple and Microsoft are gaming the system?
“RMS: I have to point out that innovation is not my highest value. Human rights are my highest values. So I don’t to get into the dialogue that treats innovation as a primary goal.
“With software patents the US has become a dangerous place for software development, including innovative software development, because when a program is innovative, that means it has some new ideas in it. But it also has lots of well-known ideas in it. A large program combines thousands of ideas. So if you have some new ideas and you want to use them, in order to use them you have to combine them with a lot of other ideas that are well-known. And if you are not allowed to do that because those other ideas are patented, you can’t use your new idea.”
Stallman might be described as eccentric by some, but what about business people like Mark Shuttleworth? Well, he too holds a similar opinion on the US patent system, as noted here before. One article which was written about it says that the whole patent system is a sham, according to Shuttleworth. And for those who cry foul and say that patents are only disliked by ‘freeriders’, let us remember who Shuttleworth is:
Mark Shuttleworth is probably best known for three things. Selling the certificate authority Thawte Consulting to VeriSign for about $575 million in 1999; using some of that money to become the second self-funded space tourist; and using some more of it to found and sustain the Ubuntu version of GNU/Linux.
Two friends have a good chat about free software at OSCON.
The CarrierIQ issue, even if it is part of an organized campaign to smear and ruin Android [2], is showing people the dangers of using non free software. Even one piece of non free software can betray users, so mostly free, “pragmatic” systems can be just as bad as regular non free systems. The free software community should capitalize on this awareness to change people’s attitudes towards their devices so that they will reject non free software in the future. Software freedom must be complete for users to have real conrtol and privacy.
Richard Stallman wrote an extensive review of Android back in September. It lists all of the parts of available phones that can be used maliciously against users, which surprisingly include the radio control firmware. The conclusion was unequivocal, “Android is a major step towards an ethical, user-controlled, free-software portable phone, but there is a long way to go. … While any computing system might have bugs, these devices might be bugs.”
When the CarrierIQ scandal broke, Mr. Stallman was not surprised. His comment was,
The root cause of this problem is that the users don’t control the software on these phones. So if they didn’t put in this surveillance package [Carrier IQ], they would put in some other. The users’ only protection against malicious features (surveillance, intentional restrictions, and back doors) is to insist on free software.
Anyone in the Open Source community who’s surprised should think hard about what the Free Software Society has been telling them. About four years ago at a “Web 2.0″ meeting, Eben Moglen urged the Tim O’Reilly and the Open Source community to quit, “wasting time promoting commercial products.” O’Reilly was sad that Moglen did not want to talk about protecting people’s data on other people’s computers in “the cloud,” but CarrierIQ makes it plain that those rights and protections are meaningless if the user is stripped of privacy by malware in their pocket. It might have been useful ten years ago to hide scary talk about freedom from big companies like IBM. It worked, thanks, but talk about “best tool for the job” and “pragmatic” mixes of free and non free software should now be considered counter productive and the results dangerous.
There are community alternatives to carrier issued Android. Stallman mentions Replicant, a 100% free software replacement for Android. There is also a less careful distribution called CyanogenMod that is focused on performance and includes non free software from Google and perhaps device drivers. Jeff Hoogland, the founder of Bodhi GNU/Linux, is working on Debian for cell phones and we can be sure many others are as well. In the mean time, if you must have a smart phone, it might as well be Android because there is no chance a phone from Apple or Microsoft will be liberated, but don’t expect it to be a Freedom Box the community really wants [2 and don't trust it until it's really free.
The lack of freedom in cell phones is not a natural state but is unlikely to end without changes and enforcement of US law. Android has emerged as the top cell phone OS because it is free software and creates a productive commons for the odd hundred companies that must cooperate to make a cell phoneThe obnoxious US patent system has allowed Microsoft and Apple to practice judicial extortion that should have been blocked by US anti-trust and racketeering laws[1, 2,3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Spectrum licensing itself is a technically obsolete and harmful practice but the FCC could demand adherence to technical standards, demand the publication of technical standards required to operate phones, and forbid practices such as phone locking as the price carriers pay for spectrum as it transitions to open spectrum.
Posted in Europe, Law, Patents at 3:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Klaus-Heiner Lehne / Source: Europa.eu
Summary: Various updates about the patents situation across Europe
LAST year Apple decided that it could not compete fairly against HTC, which now sells more phones (running Android/Linux) than Apple in the United States. Apple dropped to third, trailing Samsung.
So Apple sued HTC and found favour in its home country, as expected. In Europe it has been a different story and Apple is failing to block Linux/Android-powered devices from Samsung. Even the regulators get involved right now, which ought to make Apple worry. But Europe has had some elements in it that are dangerous in the sense that they play ball for US-based multinationals. They also try to legalise software patents by harmonising US- and EU-based patent regulations. Anne-Cat Lorrain writes: “European Commission: “the creation of a EU patent court is on a good track”. Audience not so “optimistic”… #ictsp11″
The EU patent “package” moved a step closer to final approval on Tuesday, when the Legal Affairs Committee approved a mandate to open formal negotiations with national governments to agree to create unitary patent, so as to cut costs for firms and boost the EU’s competitiveness. Parliament will strive to adapt the proposed regime to small firms’ needs.
The European Parliament’s rapporteurs, who will negotiate with national governments, will treat the three proposals (unitary patent, language regime and unified patent court) as a package, meaning none will be agreed without the others. According to the mandate, approved by the committee with 16 votes in favour and 3 against, the MEP negotiators will also ask that the three laws enter into force at the same time.
The aim of creating an EU patent is twofold. First to reduce current patenting costs by up to 80%, so as to improve the competitive position of EU firms vis-à-vis their counterparts in the US and Japan, where patents are substantially cheaper. Second, it should help to avoid the legal confusion created when dealing with differing national patent laws.
MT @zoobab @VisaePatentes OUTRAGEOUS: #JURI mandates #Lehne to negotiate #unitarypatent with Commission/Council behind closed doors>>shame
Zoobab also notes that the “Polish Presidency turn its coat for software patents through a central patent court,” according to this post which says:
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk sent a letter to the presidents of the EU institutions, on 18 November, pressing for an agreement on adoption of the harmonised European patent system. “This is one of the most important projects for the common market, to which the latest Council Presidencies have devoted considerable work and attention,” said Tusk. “In a context of increasing competition at global level, we cannot afford to keep the current system, which is one of the world’s costliest and which limits both innovation and the competitiveness of our enterprises.”
We wrote about this stance of the Polish Presidency in [1, 2, 3]. The president of the FFII (Zoobab) argues that the “European Parliament JURI committee [is] against ban of software patents, so pushing for them via central caselaw, was to be expected”
He also points out that the “EU patent draft introduces joint Member States liability for any failure of the patent court to apply EU law”
Anyone who has encountered the AmeriKat in the past two weeks will have been subjected to a “what are you doing to help get the Unified Patent Court to London” style of questioning. During and outside of her workday she is still doing a fair amount of London cheerleading, so much so that she has failed to pick up the recent House of Commons Select Committee on European Scrutiny’s report on “Enforcement of Patent Rights”. In May of this year the IPKat reported on the Scrutiny Committee’s scrutiny of the unified patent system and Baroness Wilcox. More recently, on 9 November 2011, the European Scrutiny Committee considered a recent, but not the latest, Draft Agreement on a Unified Patent Court and draft Statute. The European Scrutiny Committee does what it says on the tin/can – they scrutinize draft EU legislation on behalf of the House of Commons and determine which proposals are of political or legal importance. Good news – the UPC ticks both boxes! The Committee flags up these proposals to the House through their weekly Committee Reports and by recommending that some draft legislation be debated – either by the European Committees or by the House of Commons. For a list of members of the Scrutiny Committee click here.
Summary: Some bits of news that seem relevant to the patent wars which affect Linux and Free software in general
THE US patent system is as broken as it has been since the start of this year (and probably more broken than ever before).
Lodsys the patent troll extorts a company, proving just how ridiculous things have become and The Economistsays: “The number of patent applications in the world rose from around 800,000 in the early 1980s to 1.8m in 2009, according to the World Intellectual Property Report 2011, newly published by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).”
This is not a good thing and it also shows that patents are not indicative of innovation. Innovation did not just double in a couple of decades. What we see here is a world that gets increasingly troubled and disturbed by patent monopolies.
When patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures are the ones rising while other companies — real companies that make products — declare bankruptcy, then innovation is truly doomed.
Apple secured a patent yesterday on software to create and identify 3D models of faces, animals, aircraft, military vehicles and tumours in one of the more unusual tech patents to be awarded in recent months. This came to light after the US Patent and Trademark Office published a series of newly awarded patents.
Shame on Apple for claiming monopolies on mathematical methods. That’s what Computer Vision is about, mostly manipulation of matrices. There is no excuse for granting exclusive rights on use of geometry. Whose laws of nature are these anyway?
Party president Tommy Fergusson said the key issues for the party were the “three strikes” copyright regime that came into force in September, under which people can be fined up to $15,000 for downloading copyright material, software patents and a filtering system set up by Internal Affairs to block access to child pornography sites.
The part relevant to us is about software patents. Other parties do not talk about it. Over in Europe, regulators get involved and one source says that “The European Commission ‘s vice president for competition, Joaquin Almunia, has for the first time publicly voiced his concern about how certain high-tech companies may be using intellectual property rights unfairly to thwart rivals and distort competition, reports Reuters.
“Almunia’s decision to speak publicly could signal that an official investigation is in the works.
“In particular, the European Commission is looking into the spate of smartphone patent battles between Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Samsung Corp. , but it has not yet launched an official probe. The EC requested information from Apple and Samsung, but Almunia said he has not received answers. (See Euronews: Vodafone Guns for UK Govt Deals.)”
How does any of this patent confrontation which Apple started benefit the European buyers? Here is what Murdoch’s press quotes in relation to this:
“The patent system is very seriously screwed up,” says Ed Black
Ed Black was paid by Microsoft and even he is able that the patent system lost its way.
Some of the better examples of the patent system being broken come from the smartphones sector. Here is a new article about this which says:
Smartphone sector in a patent arms race
[...]
Specifically, an eruption of patent lawsuits has occurred between almost every major developer of smartphone hardware and software in the industry. In many respects, companies are buying insurance against future legal action, injunctions, etc.
Microsoft is currently using Nokia as a patents weapon, probably against Android (through MOSAID). The president of the FFII writes: “Nokia patent lawyer gives no solution for SMEs attacked by trolls, left them in the cold by dark software patent system”
The Pirate Party in New Zealand has also just stepped in (yes, again) and gotten involved in the news again. No other party seems to be doing anything substantial about it. Those who do simply struggle to get funding and those who do (like the German Pirate Party) sell out by taking money from supporters of software patents. Here is what happens in New Zealand:
Internet users in Hamilton East and Wellington who are concerned about the “Skynet” copyright regime will have a chance to make a protest vote at the election tomorrow.
The Pirate Party failed to garner the 500 members it needed to contest the party vote in the election, but is fielding candidates in the two constituencies.
What we desperately need in all nation is a political presence that realises what patents are really about. Not some online petitions which give a shallow impression of the public being listened to; we need real action. The Against Monopoly Web site cites a new article that tackles an issue related to software patents and remarks as follows:
The New York Times ran a surprisingly long and tough piece from Reuters titled Making Sense of Patent Law link here. It opens, saying “The United States Supreme Court has a chance to reverse the mission creep in patent law. The system is supposed to reward inventors but not stifle innovation. Fuzzy and overly broad concepts like thought processes generally are not protected. Yet one company, Prometheus Laboratories, reckons it owns a method for interpreting how patients react to a drug.”
It then traces the history of patent law covering ideas which consistently forbade such patents but by 1994, was patenting “any software with a practical purpose.”
What example can be cited of a software patent bringing real progress and lowering costs? Innovation is supposed to be about benefits, not the hoarding of paperwork and legal fees that accompany this. █
Posted in Europe, Law, Patents at 9:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
ಠ_ಠ
Summary: Lawyers hijack people’s laws (for their own financial benefit) and the FFII issues an announcement of sorts
THE PATENTS ‘industry’ is one of patent lawyers and elevated lawyers (aka judges), who are extracting a lot of money from a real industry, essentially raising the prices of everything to justify their own parasitical existence. “Patent judges wants [sic] the last word over patent law in Europe,” writes the president of the FFII, “afraid of “unspecialized” European Court of Justice” (in IRC he told us that “patent judges wants EU monopoly over patent law”).
Here is the Microsoft Word document that shows this. We pulled the text out of this binary enclosure that requires Microsoft code/patents:
Introduction
The European Patent Lawyers Association (EPLAW), comprising lawyers with many years of experience in European patent litigation, has been following closely the preparatory work for and the legal discussions regarding the creation of a European patent court system. In cooperation with the EPO Academy EPLAW has been organizing since 2005 the Venice Judges Forum, and several of its board members who are also members of the EU Commission’s Group of Experts have participated in shaping the texts of the relevant international documents. EPLAW members represent both large multinational corporations in all fields of technology as well as SMEs with very small patent portfolios.
As a result of discussions on the Draft Agreement on a United Patent Court and the Regulation on a Unitary Patent at the 7th Venice Judges Forum on October 29, 2011 which was also attended by the representatives of the Polish Presidency and the EU Commission EPLAW has concluded as follows.
Regulation on Unitary Patent Arts 6 – 8
EPLAW had requested in its Resolution of 27 September 2011 urgent amendments of the Agreement on a United Patent Court and the Unitary Patent respectively which has been explained and discussed in Venice in detail. Judges and litigators all agreed that what in EPLAW’s Resolution under par. II.f) had been described as the most serious drafting error, namely including Arts. 6 – 8 of the Regulation into the text of the Regulation on the Unitary Patent, must be corrected.
Supported by a legal opinion of Prof. Krasser, one of the most prestigious German scholars of patent law, EPLAW referred to the extremely negative consequences of the insertion of Art. 6 to 8 in the Regulation for the users which Prof. Krasser has explained in detail. The EPLAW Board has confirmed in Venice that its members fully approve also Prof. Krasser’s interpretation of Art. 118 TFEU. The following citations and key conclusions from the Opinion highlight the arguments which the judges and attorneys who are members of the Commission’s Expert Group had unanimously concluded already in their first discussion on this question in April of this year in Brussels.
3. The minimum requirement for the application of the authorisation is, according to Art. 118 (1) TFEU, merely that an intellectual property right is created by Union law. This itself achieves the necessary minimum harmonisation at least if the subject matter and core effect of the right in question is established identically in the law of the (participating) Member States….
..For this reason, the proposed Regulation can be restricted to creating the basis for the grant of unitary patents for the participating Member States….
..It is sufficient for the uniform protection required by Art. 118 (1) TFEU and the “same effect” of Art. 3 (2) of the proposed Regulation that the aforesaid core effect is unitary..
5. To date, it is undisputed that Art. 118 (1) TFEU, in the event that a unitary patent under Union law is created, does not require the preconditions for the grant to be regulated under Union law. On the contrary, the provisions of the EPC will continue to apply, and the EPC is not part of Union law…
..It would be logical to word the Regulation … in such a way that questions of the content and limits on the effect of such patents cannot give rise to a submission to the Court of Justice.
EPLAW is of the opinion that even if there may be legal reasons why one could come to the conclusion that including rules of substantive patent law into the Regulation, such rules are not required. Their rejection by the great majority of member states and practically all users results from the promise by the Commission and the Council that only judges with the highest qualification and experience in patent law should deal with patent litigation between private parties, so that an involvement of the ECJ beyond the EU legal order as it exists today should be avoided, otherwise the entire project could be endangered. Users request an efficient and predictable procedure before highly experienced judges which they would not get in proceedings which would include referrals on substantive law to the ECJ.
The bottom line is, the legal system in Europe does not serve its citizens. It seems to be serving either the patent lawyers or the multinationals whom they make money from (to distort the competition). Klaus-Heiner Lehne is a good exampleof that. █
THE WORLD’S biggest patent troll, created largely by Microsoft folks (including funding from Bill Gates), is lobbying the government on patent laws. And guess whose side the government is choosing? Dvorak speaks of the “Gates PR machine” in his very recent article which reminds us to get back to coverage about Gates Foundation. Dvorak writes:
The Gates PR machine, which is always waiting in the wings to pounce if needed, was apparently called into action.
Writers recognise that Gates not only employ many lobbyists (for profit at others’ expense); he also stole the press and it shows. Just because he smiles and wears a sweater does not make him harmless. There is a new headline in Boing Boing and it says ‘James Murdoch, “the first Mafia boss in history who didn’t know he was running a criminal enterprise”‘.
Here we have a new video where Gates’ attempts to privatise schools and influence them for profit gets criticised but only gently. Watch this:
With a lot of influence over the government, Gates has probably been able to defuse Microsoft oversight and months ago we found out that he was lobbying for more outrageous patent laws in the United States (not just in other countries). It is new stuff like “OnePatont” trolling big companies [1, 2] that serves as evidence of how broken things really are. It’s business as usual at the patent offices of north America and the government refuses to listen to the people; it listens to its private rich funders instead, resulting not just in boguslawsuits but also an elevated cost for everyone. Well, at least patent lawyers are happy. To quote just one new example:
In a verdict that could have significant implications for the Internet software industry, a federal court jury in Central Islip, N.Y. found AOL liable for infringing the patent of BASCOM Global Internet Services, Inc., a Long Island Internet software company. The jury also found that BASCOM’s patent, which covers remote filtering of adult or other inappropriate content, among other things, is valid and enforceable. The jury awarded BASCOM $10 million dollars in damages as a royalty for AOL’s infringement.
If this is “innovation”, then innovation is dead. To quote another new article of interest:
The White House weighs in on software patents, doesn’t say much
[...]
So, what does this mean? It’s difficult to say. There isn’t a lot of substance to examine in this statement. In a nutshell, the administration is a big believer in the new patent legislation the President just signed (to be expected), and it seems to have an affinity for “open source energy.” On the issue of what can, or should, be done to address people’s concerns over software patents in the US, the White House isn’t saying much.
So the government does not listen to the people and, quite importantly, it ignores what developers want. What would be the best course of action then? Here is another new perspective from a developer:
MIME creator: Developers face patent trap
Patent infringement lawsuits have become a very real concern for independent developers and big companies alike, a situation highlighted by the growing number of high-profile courtroom battles over intellectual property.
In order to resolve the copyright issue (Hollywood driving policy against the people) Professor Lessig decided to leave aside Creative Commons and embark on a political crusade about unjust influence that corrupted his government. To remove software patents from the USPTO, a similar strategy may be necessary. The answers in both cases are simple and obvious. It is clear what citizens prefer. But it’s not them who decide, it’s that “1%” that calls all the shots. The illness is systemic and we know who controls the system. They are public figures and the real economy does not depend on them; it suffers from them every single day because they squeeze it like a squeegee to get richer and richer, hoarding whatever capital/property is left. Patent law today is an instrument for legalised looting. █
