Bonum Certa Men Certa

How India's Legal Rule Regarding Patents Gets 'Regulated' by the West, Facebook is Hoarding Software Patents

Monument



Summary: Microsoft lobbying group is working to change India's patent law; Facebook reportedly spends $40 million on buying monopolies on social networking

ONE topic that we covered extensively last year and in 2008 is the policy in India regarding software patents.



According to this fascinating new report, there is colonisation through the legal system, which is not entirely surprising given the presence and function of companies like Infosys too.

Powerful industry lobbies, domestic and foreign, are tutoring our judiciary on how to resolve patent disputes

FOR some time now, industry lobbies in India have been on a patent high. Seminars, workshops and road shows galore have been hosted across the country to make India a ‘patent-conscious’ nation, that is, to turn Indians into a people who will respect intellectual property (IP) rights to a fault, but is actually a campaign geared to effecting legislative changes that entail higher levels of patent enforcement. It has been a tremendous enterprise with no let-up in energy or ideas, an initiative that gets plenty of backing from the US embassy which has a zealous official of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) posted in Delhi as the first secretary for IP.

US academia, too, is heavily invested in this herculean task of educating Indians of various callings, but primarily from those professions that matter: judges and patent attorneys and the media. And no amount of public outrage here or in the US itself has dampened the enthusiasm of industry lobbies for ‘sensitising’ the Indian judiciary on the intricacies of patent law interpretations. Why is it that our judges are considered deficient in this area and not, say, in industrial disasters, forest rights environmental hazards, or the complexities of Special Economic Zones? Even more offensive is the objective of one of America’s self-appointed examiners of India’s patent laws, George Washington University, which says its India Project aims to see if India’s Patent Act is actually “in compliance with Indian constitutional standards”!

[...]

Also making a presentation was the Business Software Alliance, the grouping of software industry giants like Microsoft and IBM, which is under fire for its figures of software piracy that are based on flawed methodology and are therefore highly exaggerated and make misleading claims about its impact on the overall economy.


Yes, that's the BSA, a Microsoft lobbyist for software patents. Why does the USPTO (and lawyers who orbit it for cash) need to intervene in another country's affairs? We wrote about this in relation to New Zealand.

No patent system has encouraged the practice of patent trolls like the USPTO has done and one frequent victim/abuser is Facebook, which is reportedly hoarding patents right now.

Facebook Buys $40 Million Worth of Social Networking Patents



Facebook has acquired a broad set of patents on social networking covering the basic functions of just about any social app, ranging from friend lists to the news feed.


We have already criticised Facebook's patent policy [1, 2]. Facebook's founder has been in touch with Microsoft's patent troll (although in other articles too we fail to find a direct link between this troll and Facebook's acquisitions [1, 2]).

Patents are not about innovation. As Thomas Edison teaches us, patents are about hoarding; it's a businessman's thing.

"Kildall took me aside once, about '83. [He started] talking about Apple. He opened this door, and I saw the bitterness: 'Steve Jobs is nothing. Steve Wozniak did it all, the hardware and the software. All Jobs did was hang around and take the credit.'" Cooper was not blind to the implications of this. Kildall resented that Gates, this dropout, this businessman, was getting credit for things that Kildall had invented. "All of a sudden there was this cauldron of resentment. It must have tortured Gary that Bill Gates [got all the credit]."

--Gaby's Homepage for CP/M and Computer History



Recent Techrights' Posts

What's Very Vexing to GAFAM, EPO and Others Is That It's Incredibly Hard to Censor Us (and Nobody Ever Successfully Did That Before)
resist, do not capitulate
Receiving SLAPPs and Collecting Them Like Trophies (the SLAPPs Always Fail)
People who file lawsuits bring even more attention to themselves (or to embarrassing statements about them)
Year of GNU/Linux on the Laptop?
It's not happening only in Lenovo
What People Must Understand About the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
some facts about the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
More Copyright Lawsuits Against LLM Slop Providers and Suppliers of LLM Slopfarms Would Benefit Society
It's not just bad for the Web and for society; it's also legally dangerous
 
Links 27/04/2025: Death of Nest Thermostats, Death of Metaverse
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Projects Workflow and Discovering Technology
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 26, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, April 26, 2025
Microsoft Isn't on the Map in USSR
To them, it's either Google or Yandex
In Central America Windows Became a Small Force
These are countries where Windows used to have well over 95% of the "market"
Site May be Even Faster Now
It basically takes less than a tenth of a second to serve the page
Many of the Scandals Are Interconnected (Overlapping People and Corporations)
We're only getting started
Links 26/04/2025: General Assassinated in the Town of Balashikha, US Promoting Seafloor Mining
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: Facebook Layoffs Again, Remembering What's Real, and Say No to Mass Surveillance
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: NOAA Budget Cuts and "Dog Days Ahead"
Links for the day
In defence of JD Vance, death of Pope Francis
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Three Years in Prison for Disney Employee’s ‘Menu Hacking’: The Economic Fallout of Digital Menus
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 25, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, April 25, 2025
Links 25/04/2025: Slop Fatigue and Patent Judges Flocking to Fake, Unconstitutional and Illegal Kangaroo Court (UPC, Captured 'Justice')
Links for the day
Gemini Links 25/04/2025: Night Manager and Devuan in Hosting
Links for the day
Approaching 10,000 Articles/Pages Since Going Static
Trying to silence or derail the site was always a dumb strategy
Windows Falls to New Lows in Nicaragua, Now Below a Quarter (It Used to be Almost 100%)
Another all-time low for Windows
Microsoft is Shedding Off Loads of Staff and That Can be Dangerous Too
Working for Microsoft is a choice; nobody forces you to do it
Richard Stallman and the Unix Philosophy
When asked about systemd people must remember that RMS speaks as an active Board member of the FSF and also the founder of the FSF
The Cost (to Linux) of LLM Slop
Slop 'artists' like Fagioli are far from harmless
Links 25/04/2025: Ubisoft Spyware, Hegseth Fails at Tech on Every Level
Links for the day
Gemini Links 25/04/2025: Food Forest Update and Facebook Destroying the Net
Links for the day
Get Rid of Back Doors, Don't Obsess Over Bounties and Other Corporate PR Stunts (or Needless Reboot Rituals)
Security as a term has mostly lost its meaning due to repeated misuse for many years
Serial Sloppers Are Killing the Web (They Probably Don't Care, Either)
Slop is a disease on the Web
Streaming Apps Are “Investor Fraud” That Kills the Planet
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Things Get Increasingly Nasty at Microsoft Ahead of the Fake Results and May's Mass Layoffs Wave
They try to get people to 'resign' so that they won't count as layoffs and the company's 'wellbeing' will seem better
IBM's Debt Ballooned by 8.5 Billion Dollars in Just 3 Months!
Hallmark of a company in a state of disarray, trying to spend its way out of trouble
Big Trouble in GNOME
even GNOME people admit the CoC went wrong
Slopping the Trough: Disney Plus Loses Billions and the Decline of Physical Media in America
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, April 24, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, April 24, 2025