LATER this week -- on Thursday to be precise -- people will speak about patents at the 2010 Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. The list of speakers is interesting because it includes some lawyer types who do not oppose software patents.
This year an emphasis will be given to the issues of IPR and development and open source. Papers addressing the challenges encountered by developing countries in the context of the TRIPS (trade related aspects of intellectual property rights) agreement, the protection of traditional knowledge, the issues of IPR and health and access to knowledge in developing countries, and the challenging view of the open source alternative to IPR will be particularly welcome.
Commerce Minister Simon Power says the Government will back changes proposed by a select committee that will mean computer software can no longer be patented.
Parliament's commerce select committee proposed amending the Patents Bill, which passed its first reading in May last year, after receiving many submissions on the controversial issue.
"Where are we now?" is the question on everyone's lips when it comes to the long trek from national patents alone to the desired destination, the Promised Land of the single patent for the European Union and a centralised and harmonised patent litigation system. Explaining the background, Oliver Varhelyi (Head of Unit, DG Internal Market and Services, European Commission) described the legal bases on which the form and substance of the agreed new regime could be reached through a combination of unanimous and majority votes.
I am purposefully not making these links HTML clickable so there won't be referring clicks from Groklaw. You can copy them into your browser to verify if you want to.
The TurboHercules website is at http://www.turbohercules.com where it is clearly the right site, talking about the TurboHercules emulator and founder Roger Bowler. The About Us page at http://www.turbohercules.com/about/ has their Paris, France address.
At http://www.turbohercules.com/resources/permalink/turbohercules-overview/ is a link to the PDF of a whitepaper http://www.turbohercules.com/uploads/main/TurboHercules_Overview_1.pdf "TurboHercules Overview: A Quick Overview of the TurboHercules System" which at the bottom of the cover page lists the address "TurboHercules Inc. | 701 Fifth Avenue, Suite 4200 Seattle, WA 98104"
There is also a marketing brochure at http://www.turbohercules.com/uploads/main/Turbohercules_Brochure_IDF_1.pdf that has the same address. An interesting snippet from it: "TurboHercules has approached IBM to consider making available to its mainframe customers a license for IBM operating systems on the Hercules platform."
This is a problem that happens all too often in these discussions. Folks who don't know much about how innovation really occurs in the tech world, and who falsely conflate concepts in tangible property with a completely different government-granted monopoly right -- automatically assume that infringement is the equivalent of "stealing." Are there cases where big companies "copy" an idea from a small company? Yes, absolutely. But it's a lot more rare than many make it out to be. The really innovative ideas? Those are the ones that big companies don't even realize are big ideas until it's too late.
"Small Software companies cannot afford to go to court or pay damages. Who is this software patent system for?" —Marco Schulze, Nightlabs Gmbh