"Intellectual Ventures (IV) will be setting up shop at the top of a Four Seasons this week as Headline Sponsor of the Ready to Commercialize 2008 conference hosted by the University of Texas at Austin. It's the patent firm's 100th university deal, though some, such as Professor Michael Heller at Columbia University, warn against such deals. '... their individual profit comes at the cost of the public ability to innovate. The university's larger mission is to serve the public interest, and some of these deals work against that public interest.' It's a follow-up to the conference IV sponsored last summer for technology transfer professionals entrusted with commercializing their universities' intellectual property, and should help IV, a friend of Microsoft, snag even more exclusive deals (PDF)."
I will soon publish my impression from a highly entertaining European Commission workshop on intellectual property rights and ICT standards on 19 November 2008 in Brussels, Belgium held at the Bedford Hotel, formerly a cotton mill. Since I attended yesterday at the Commission in Brussels, I am still patching up my notes. Here is a very first impression. These are soundbites from the workshop. Some caused laughter. Others were just strange. Others again did not necessarily have one clear interpretation. I will leave it to the readers to interpret them for now.
In its new opinion, the court declined to settle the issue of when, if ever, software based inventions should be patentable. Even so, the new test in Bilski will probably limit the patentability of software.
Future cases will shed further light on this issue. In the meantime, the holder of a poor quality software patent is likely to think more carefully about bringing a lawsuit, because the patent may be ruled invalid.
The FOSS community and its supporters need to explain to our friends, neighbors, and legislators the practical realities of software patents. We need to continue to challenge received wisdom about innovation in software, and to explain that patents do not always foster innovation.
Some people say that the referral of the questions is a feeble surrender to the demand of Lord Justice Jacob in Aerotel/Macrossan that the EPO resolve the contradictions in its earlier rulings -- contradictions the existence of which the previous President of the EPO denied -- or whether it is a resolute defence of the EPO's resistance to such pressures that have led it to ask its own questions of the Enlarged Board rather than those articulated by Jacob LJ. The nature of the questions has itself given rise to plenty of speculation. Are they there simply to remove perceived inconsistencies in EPO practice, or are they posed in order to provide an excuse to send out answers that will seek to bind practice in national offices too?