Bonum Certa Men Certa

Patents Roundup: USPTO Workshop, Bilski Action, and Patents-Imposed Death

Fire escape
It gets harder to escape patents on DNA



Summary: Proposed solutions, impending cases, and another new case where patents go so terribly wrong that even people needlessly die

TODAY we look at 3 types of news from the past 3 days or so. Software patents are being covered too, but everyone is still waiting for In Re Bilski to be concluded.

USPTO and Patent Conundrums



Today (May 26th), the USPTO has this workshop which is intended to "explore the intersection of patent policy and competition policy". How about tackling the problem of patent pools, which make up thickets and abusive cartels?

Three separate companies are steadily recruiting intellectual property holders into patent pools for LTE (Long-Term Evolution) technology, initiatives intended to get more manufacturers building gear for the fast network.


Patent pools are only suitable for large companies -- those that exclude new entrants. The only small entities to benefit from this system are the NPEs (trolls). Samsung and LG, the two Korean giants which pay Microsoft for Linux, are complaining about patent trolls right now.

Representatives say South Korean electronics makers are becoming targets from ``patent trolls'' as increased competition between manufacturers makes room to seek more money in legal suits.


Did Microsoft, which Salesforce's CEO Benioff compares to a patent troll, sign those Linux patent deals with Samsung and LG only after threats of litigation? We might never know.

In Re Bilski



Brad Feld writes about "innovating against software patents" and receives support from Groklaw.

Last week, Microsoft sued Salesforce.com claiming infringement of 9 software patents. This comes shortly after Nokia sued Apple who sued Nokia over software patents, and after Apple sued HTC who sued Apple over software patents.

As an example of the ridiculous nature of software patents, Microsoft’s claims cover user interface features, including a "system and method for providing and displaying a Web page having an embedded menu" and a "method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display."

This explosion of litigation based on the patenting of software cannot be brushed-off as large corporations doing what they do, as almost every start-up software company is at some point being shaken down by software patent holders. It’s a massive tax on and retardant of innovation.


From Pamela Jones:

I have a request from End Software Patents' Ciarán O'Riordan. He'd like your help.

He says VC good guy Brad Feld is interested in in mailing out copies of the film Patent Absurdity (Full title: Patent Absurdity: How software patents broke the system) to 200 people -- politicians, influential people in companies, policy setters at standards groups, and whoever will be influential in the debate the breaks out post-Bilski -- and he'd like to have some help from you coming up with a list of who best to send to.


This system in the United States (USPTO) needs a change and it needs it urgently. Glyn Moody writes about the German ruling on software patents [1, 2, 3, 4] and points out that "some argue there were similar ones in early 90s" (so maybe it's not as bad as some people imagined). It is mostly the USPTO which 'exports' those bad laws to the rest of the world. The problem ought to be squashed in the US and in Japan.

Patents on Life



Red Hat's new Web site writes about how the GPL can inspire a solution to the increasingly-serious injustice which is patenting of living things [1, 2].

The Economist is right on top of the story of the first fully synthetic life-form. For those of you who may have missed the announcement last week, Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith, the two American biologists who unravelled the first DNA sequence of a living organism (a bacterium) in 1995, have pushed the envelope again, demonstrating the first successful boot-up of a synthetic bacterium. Editors at the Economist argue that the only sensible way to protect ourselves from such creations is to require that the DNA sequences be open source. It is a profound insight.

[...]

But now he's back, and he's built the one thing that sits as an exception to the Gene Patent exclusions: a wholly synthetic lifeform. Does Ventner really want to advance science (which he has done), or is he searching, like Charles Muntz, villain of the PIXAR movie UP, for his ultimate, exclusive patent on life?


What happens when patent law kills patients? [via]

When a child dies of brain disease at Children's Hospital of Orange County, Philip H. Schwartz meets with the parents, explains his research and asks them to donate their child's brain to his quest for a cure.

"These are not easy conversations to have," he said. "There are expectations by parents that if they allow us to do that to their child, it will serve a useful purpose."

But for three years, the cells derived from many of those children's brains have been suspended in limbo, frozen in Thermos bottles. The nonprofit Southern California hospital has shut down the research, intimidated by a patent claim from the Palo Alto biotech company StemCells. The company's co-founder is esteemed Stanford stem cell scientist Dr. Irving Weissman, one of the world's most passionate advocates for giving scientists access to a field entangled by politics, ethics — and now money.


Against Monopoly asks, "Who Owns You?"

Recent Techrights' Posts

Richard Stallman (RMS) Talk in Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress Will be Remote
This past week RMS received lots of accolades online
Links 28/08/2025: Chatbots Distorting/Fabricating History and Also Driving Suicide
Links for the day
Open Source Initiative (OSI) Resists Software Freedom, Even by Attacking Its Own
The OSI is compromised
 
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 28, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, August 28, 2025
Gemini Links 29/08/2025: Poems, Games, and Java 25 Performance
Links for the day
Links 28/08/2025: Greenland 'Interferences' by US and Skinnerboxes to Get Banned in Korean Schools
Links for the day
The Register MS (Run by Microsoft Operatives): Free Software is Putin, Hence Evil and Dangerous
The current editor in chief is an American Microsofter, the previous one went to work for Google (US)
Gemini Links 28/08/2025: Back in Japan and Why "Hacker News" Sucks
Links for the day
A Much-Needed Wake-up Call to Users of Wordpress.com, Blogspot, Substack and All Those Other Outsourced (and Centralised) Platforms
There are several lessons in there
The UEFI 9/11 - Part II - Campaign of Censorship and Defamation Against Critics
In dictatorships, humour serves an important role. It's tragic.
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, August 27, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, August 27, 2025
Slopwatch: linuxsecurity.com, Slopfarms in Google News, and More
Some readers of ours end up sending us links that are from slopfarms, not realising those are slopfarms
Gemini Links 27/08/2025: Katrina Memories and Google Versus Software Freedom
Links for the day
Links 27/08/2025: Police Against Media Freedom in the UK, Energy-Hungry Countries Targeted by China
Links for the day
Microsoft Windows Fell to All-Time Lows in Egypt This Summer, Vista 11 Adoption Decreases While GNU/Linux Increases
Vista 11 is going down rather than up
Links 27/08/2025: Microsoft Demoralises Staff With Slop Demands, Leaving Mastodon Explained
Links for the day
12 Hours Ago The Register MS Published a Fake (Paid-for) Article, But This One for a Change Did Not Promote a Ponzi Scheme
There are also Free software alternatives, but they don't pay The Register MS for "synthetic" so-called 'journalism'
More People Need to Call Out and Put a Stop to Serial Sloppers
Unless slopfarms are stopped, people will read and share Microsoft propaganda made by chatbots
Gemini Links 27/08/2025: Headphones and Tartarus
Links for the day
Morale at Microsoft is Terrible (Proprietary Plagiarism Machines Have No Future, LLM Slop is a Bubble)
The slop sceptics/critics are going to have lots of "told you so" moments
GNOME "governance issues, staff reduction, etc." amidst Albanian whistleblowing and women trafficking
Notice the connection to Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) and GNOME
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, August 26, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, August 26, 2025