Bonum Certa Men Certa

Patents Roundup: New Conferences, Oink of the Patent Lawyers in New Zealand, and TurboHercules' Secret Home in 701 Fifth Avenue, Suite 4200 Seattle, WA 98104

TurboHercules



Summary: The latest software patents news from New Zealand, Europe, the United States, and an American Microsoft proxy that pretends to be European (near the Commission)

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.



The EPIP conference is also looking for paper submissions. Emphasis will be put on Free software and software patents, oddly enough (because the conference is in Europe).

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.


Over in New Zealand, it's mostly the lawyer types who stifle a necessary reform that would explicitly forbid software patents [1, 2, 3, 4]. Watch the following new video from New Zealand (NZOSS) and listen to the background sounds.

12M





Direct link



Here is IDG's latest update on the situation in New Zealand:

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.


As we pointed out a couple of days ago, Judge Stevens is retiring and this is a big deal because of his involvement in the Bilski case. The president of the FFII, Benjamin Henrion, shows that a "Patent Attorney is afraid of Judge Stevens for writing Bilski decision, hopes he retires soon" (well, he got his wish fulfilled).

Henrion has also spotted IPKat's new essay on what he calls "the UPLS attempt to validate software patents in Europe" (the former can facilitate the latter).

"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.


We cannot quite avoid speaking about the curious case of TurboHercules -- a case that we've covered in :

  1. Microsoft Proxy Attack on GNU/Linux Continues With TurboHercules
  2. Eye on Security: Windows Malware, Emergency Patches, and BeyondTrust's CEO from Microsoft
  3. IBM Uses Software Patents Aggressively
  4. IBM's Day of Shame
  5. IBM Will Never be the Same After Taking Software Patents Out of Its Holster
  6. Thumbs up to Ubuntu for Removing a Part of Microsoft; TurboHercules Likely a Psystar-Type Microsoft Shell
  7. Why IBM Does Deserve Scrutiny (Updated)
  8. Patents Roundup: Fordham Conference for Software Patents in Europe, NZOSS Responds to Pro-Software Patents Lobbyists, and TurboHercules' Ties With Microsoft Explained
  9. Florian Müller Seemingly Connected to CCIA (Microsoft Proxy)


Intel's heinous crimes did not prevent HP from getting closer to Barrett this month (he is among the key people who attacked OLPC), but we were more interested in understating HP's possible role in the TurboHercules case. Groklaw has just explained this relationship. It's great work from Pamela Jones; in fact, many updates on her previous post show that TurboHercules used a simple trick to pull the list of patents from IBM. The closer one looks, the worse it looks for TurboHercules, whose location is elucidated as follows in one of the comments:

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."


As Groklaw shows, it is also a Windows company, not quite an "open source" company as Florian Müller and others from that same ilk want reporters to believe (Müller has failed to properly deny his role).

All in all, patent law is broken, yet some people mischaracterise the problem by pointing their finger in the wrong direction. Mike Masnick responds:

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.


Very few people who are developers would deny their disdain of software patents; it's mostly them who matter, but it's rarely them who vote on the subject. The "Litigation Industrial Complex" runs this show.

"Small Software companies cannot afford to go to court or pay damages. Who is this software patent system for?" —Marco Schulze, Nightlabs Gmbh

Recent Techrights' Posts

The Ultimate and Inevitable Fall of OpenAI (Even Brave is 'Bigger' Now)
"When you advertise at the Super Bowl, you’ve reached just about every consumer in America. It’s the last stop. If you’re not profitable yet, you never will be."
GNU/Linux Rises to All-Time High in Chile
sharp rise for GNU/Linux in Chile
 
Links 10/02/2025: Facebook Mass Layoffs, "Meta" Did What Aaron Swartz Had Done But to the Tune of 81.7 Terabytes
Links for the day
Microsoft Tarnishing the Brand of Arch
Of course Arch can do whatever it wants, but being associated with Microsoft is a badge of shame
Adding Slop to Your Blog Only Makes One Assume All the Text is LLM Slop
Simon Coter from Oracle has turned to slop
Macao is Leaving Microsoft Behind
Windows is falling to new all-time lows
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, February 09, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, February 09, 2025
Microsoft's WSL (LSW) Shows That It Can Never Love Linux, Only Windows
that's just how Microsoft rolls
Activism in Times of War and a Coup
'Linux' Foundation works for fascism
What the Silencing of Neatnik Tells Us About Linus Torvalds Inside a Microsoft-Dominated 'Linux' Foundation
Is Linus Torvalds free to express his mind as he wishes about every topic, even just any technical topic?
Windows Down to 11.35% in Senegal, as Measured by statCounter
Another all-time low (Windows was at 99% in 2009)
"Latest Technology News" in BetaNews is LLM Slop Promoting OOXML and Proprietary Software at the Expense of LibreOffice and OpenDocument Format (ODF)
Remember that "open-source" and Open Source aren't the same; the former is fake
Links 09/02/2025: Coffee, Toxic Productivity, and Programming
Links for the day
Debian's Human Rights violations & Swiss women Nazi symbolism
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 09/02/2025: Software Patents on MP3 and Another Scam Dressed Up as "Crypto"
Links for the day
Links 09/02/2025: Russian Energy Cut Off, LLM Pushers Show Signs of Desperation
Links for the day
Richard Stallman (RMS) Does Not Have Media Companies and Lobbyists on His Side, But His Message Spreads Regardless
The message of RMS is spreading in spite of all the smears
Links 09/02/2025: Hottest January on Record, Panama Blackmailed
Links for the day
Why We Still Love Gemini Protocol
Gemini Protocol may seem like something "old" (it's actually very new) and something "nobody would use", but many people use it
Gemini Links 09/02/2025: "Died as a Mineral" and Game Interface for a Non-Game
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 08, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, February 08, 2025
Links 08/02/2025: UK Back Doors and Religious Fundamentalists in Positions of Higher Power
Links for the day
Today's IBM (Red Hat) Isn't the Company That Fought a Microsoft-Sponsored SCO in Court
IBM is nowadays in a state of rapid disintegration
When You Simply Rebrand Almost Everything as "Hey Hi" ("AI"), "Hey Hi Workloads", "Hey Hi Datacentres" and Whatnot
The "growth" has been a growing lie for years if not decades
Microsoft Windows Falls to 12% in Myanmar
Remember that Microsoft is virtually 0% in mobile
This is the Man Who's Attacking Linus Torvalds et al in "a Disease" (Social Control Media)
One thing that Richard M. Stallman and Torvalds can agree on is that Social Control Media should be avoided
Gemini Links 08/02/2025: "Thought Leaders" and Returns to Gemini Protocol
Links for the day
Links 08/02/2025: MElon Coup, Mass Layoffs at Facebook, and PlayStation Network Down
Links for the day
Unlike GAFAM, Free Software Serves You, It Does Not Serve Governments and MElons (Overlapping Forces)
Tired of oligarchy controlling your life through gadgets and "apps"?
On Wars Against Founders
We need to insist that founders remain
When It Comes to Social Control Media, Linus Torvalds is Channeling Techrights
GAFAM workers know exactly who to aim at
New EPO Paper: Promoting (Rewarding) People Who Grant Many Illegal European Patents to Make More Money (at Europeans' Expense) While Patent Courts in the EU Are Themselves Illegal
now the coup is sort of complete and even the "courts" are part of the corruption
Slopwatch: Carnival of LLM Slop and FUD Spewed by Bots, Pasted in by MaKenna Hensley and Day
Welcome to the Web in 2025. Articles about "Linux", "Security", and the Web (e.g. "Firefox") are fake.
Links 08/02/2025: News Corp Admits Traffic Declines, Wildlife Trafficking Tackled
Links for the day
Gemini Links 08/02/2025: Lamp and Notions
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 07, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, February 07, 2025