"I'm not a troll, damn it! I'm an innovator."
Nathan Myhrvold Now Capitalizing On Failed University Patent [Initiatives]
With so many university technology transfer offices losing money, IV has been going around and signing deals with universities. Basically, IV gives those tech transfer offices some money upfront, allowing IV to effectively add each university's patent pool to its own portfolio that it uses to go around demanding hundreds of millions of dollars from companies to "protect" them against any future lawsuits.
It is important to remember that the Supreme Court's decision in Gottschalk v. Benson is still controlling law. In that 1972 decision, the Supreme Court held unpatentable a method of converting a signal from "binary coded decimal" into "binary." The Benson method operates by using a "reentrant shift register" – a particular electronic memory circuit of the day. The rejected claim reads as follows:
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Thus under Bilski/Benson, tying a software algorithm to particular computer hardware may well be unpatentable subject matter if the patent would still preclude all practical uses of the otherwise unpatentable algorithm.
The BPAI, acknowledging Bilski, stated that the claim did not recite patentable subject matter, as it was "directed to purely software components."
The case most often cited for opening the door to business-method patents is State Street Bank & Trust v. Signature Financial Group Inc., decided in 1998 by the same court. That case, however, involved a fairly complex computer program, and all the court really said was that the validity of the patent should not turn on whether the “subject matter does ‘business’ instead of something else.” Even the poster child of business-method patents, the Amazon “one-click” patent, which was in the patent pipeline well before State Street, involved software operating on a specially designed client-server system.
One final note with regards to Specific Description and that is a look at how it would work when applied to various assets. Take a car engine, no matter how much detail we put into describing it we never end up with a car engine. A text only book is a simple case, clearly you can write word for word the contents of the book and so therefore it fails the Specific Description test. Music, even a recording, can be respresented in a form which can be translated to give the recording itself. The same applies for imagery and therefore as a combination of the previous two movies. These are all things which have long been established as the domain of copyright law, not patent law. Suggesting perhaps the Specific Description test is similar to the thought processes of those who created patent and copyright law. There is something else very common in society which fails the Specific Description test. Software.
Regardless of opinion on the merits of the new GPL, the fact is it's here--and likely here to stay.
In essence, copyleft is a complete reversal of traditional copyright values where the law sees software as a literary work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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The result is a new version of the license that is much clearer in its scope and application. It also takes greater account of software patents. To prevent software owners using patents to impose additional terms on users, the license includes the use of any patents owned by copyright holders that fall within the scope of the software. The termination provisions are also made clearer and are now automatic instead of requiring a notice from a copyright holder.
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Conversion from GPL version 2 to version 3 is increasing as existing open source applications seek to benefit from the improved certainty afforded by the new terms. That's not to say that version 2 is unenforceable, it will continue to exist and be used by those who prefer it, but version 2 and version 3 are incompatible. Thus a decision needs to be made by those organizations 'going open' as to how they would prefer their software to be made available--and soon.
On November 12, the OpenMoko project announced that all of its system images had been removed from the download server.
Leader Technologies, a provider of web-based enterprise software for groups, is apparently suing Facebook. It claims the popular social network is infringing on a patent it obtained in 2002, that “relates to a method and system for the management and storage of electronic information.” Facebook tells me it hasn’t seen the complaint yet, although Leader issued a press release earlier today saying that it has already filed the suit in Delaware.
For example, U.S. Patent No. 6,935,954, owned by Nintendo of America is directed to a sanity system for a computer game whereby events in the game affect a character's sanity, which in turn affects the ability of a user to control the character. This sanity system appears suitable for any single or multiplayer game in which characters encounter scary situations.
And don't miss the flowchart that explains how to make a sandwich.
"We're sorry, sir. Your BBQ party is over.
Your cooking infringes on patents."