11.21.12

Links 22/11/2012: New KDE, GNOME 3.x Update

Posted in News Roundup at 8:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

Kappos/IBM Part of the Patent Monopolies Disease, Enabling Cartels

Posted in GNU/Linux, IBM, Microsoft at 5:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

No change, just protectionism

Summary: Kappos’ words are telling in the sense that they expose him as the Bernanke of monopolies in software, to borrow an analogy from the Federal Reserve et al. and what they mean to various types of banks

“Patents on software are vital to American economy,” says the head of the USPTO and “calls to abolish them are wrong” (brave words). So he incites more people against the monopoly office he runs. Glyn Moody writes: “world to Kappos: get lost (oh, wait you are…)”

The headline of the report is “US patent chief to software patent critics: ‘Give it a rest already’” and it says:

David Kappos, the head of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, offered a strong defense of software patents in a Tuesday address at the Center for American Progress. Kappos touted several provisions of the America Invents Act (AIA), which he argued would allow the patent office to weed out low-quality software and business method patents.

Addressing those who claim the patent system is broken, Kappos said, “Give it a rest already. Give the AIA a chance to work. Give it a chance to even get started.”

Now we see built-in bias in the USPTO, which is led by a patent guy from IBM, one of the leading proponents of software patent and the biggest member of the patent cartel. Another growing member is Microsoft, which catches up with IBM on patent filings after hiring Mr. Phelps from IBM. Microsoft is trying to elevate the charges it derives from Android through this cartel, as Groklaw helped show us. Pamela Jones writes:

I know you join me in thanking our reporter for such detail, and his boss for letting him take the time. Imagine if all we had was media reports.

This trial was stacked by Microsoft boosters, so press coverage was deficient, obedient, and sometimes indirectly funded by Microsoft. The bottom line is, we must start challenging the cartel, IBM included. ITC is an extension of this protectionist mechanism. █

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

HTC’s CEO Confirms Our Assertion That Apple Android Tax Was Just FUD

Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google at 5:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

HTC headquarters in Taoyuan, photo by Luen

Summary: Further validation of Techrights’ rebuttal to speculation which became FUD against Android for hardware companies

FUD had been spread by the Microsoft boosters and those who listened to them last week. It said that HTC pays Apple about half a dozen dollars per Android phone sold. Now the CEO of HTC helps dispel the myth and rebut the FUD which post-HTC Samsung wants to know about:

Perhaps more important than the amount, Samsung wants to see if the deal includes all of Apple’s patents, since there are some that Apple has been insisting it would never license as part of its argument as to why there needs to be an injunction blocking the sale of Samsung devices, rather than just monetary damages.

Some Android sites and pro-Linux sites help tackle the FUD, but will anti-Android liars post corrections? Here is what we now know:

“I think that these estimates are baseless and very, very wrong. It is a outrageous number, but I’m not going to comment anything on a specific number,” said Chou. “I believe we have a very, very happy settlement and a good ending,” –

Groklaw thinks Samsung might manage not to pay a penny:

After a long week-end on my part, I see that catching up with the Apple v. Samsung post-verdict motions means going through an appallingly long and complicated list of new filings.

This must be what it feels like to be a marriage counselor. The parties come in, all upset with each other, fervently and loudly enumerating in detail each others’ sins up to the heavens, asking you to say *they* are right, and you sit there not knowing what some of what they are saying is even talking about. Even when you do, where do you start with those two?

I have no hope of explaining all of it in one article, so I’ll just highlight three items, and I’ll show you the docket with all the PDFs, and little by little, I’ll try to explain the things that matter most.

We need full disclosures in order to end Android FUD, including NDAs anti-Android lobbyists, and corrupt juries. █

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

Microsoft Proves Techrights Right by Screwing UEFI ‘Partners’

Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft at 5:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Linux booting still an issue on new PCs as Microsoft fails to deliver hardware keys

James Bottomley, who had been paid by Novell (Microsoft) before he left, is developing "secure boot" and finding out that UEFI promises are empty. From his blog:

Asked support why the process was indicating failed but I had a valid download and, after a flurry of emails, got back “Don’t use that file that is incorrectly signed. I will get back to you.” I’m still not sure what the actual problem is, but if you look at the Subject of the signing key, there’s nothing in the signing key to indicate the Linux Foundation, therefore I suspect the problem is that the binary is signed with a generic Microsoft key instead of a specific (and revocable) key tied to the Linux Foundation.

However, that’s the status: We’re still waiting for Microsoft to give the Linux Foundation a validly signed pre-bootloader. When that happens, it will get uploaded to the Linux Foundation website for all to use.

So they are losing time and they gave Microsoft the carte blanche to carry on with UEFI.

Will Hill wrote: “Predictable, jerk around. Restricted Boot is defective by design.”

Katherine Noyes says:

In any case, the end result is that, despite paying its $99 fee, the Linux Foundation so far still does not have a validly signed pre-bootloader.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols also complains:

By design, Microsoft has made installing and booting Linux on Windows 8 PCs with UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Secure Boot troublesome. Many of the major Linux distirbutors, including Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu, have proposed different ways of addressing this problem. The Linux Foundation, which supports all Linux, recently proposed a universal plan for addressing the UEFI Secure Boot issue. Unfortunately, it’s been delayed.

The plan was, as James Bottomley, Parallels’ CTO of server virtualization and well-known Linux Kernel maintainer, explained on October 10th, 2012, to “obtain a Microsoft Key and sign a small pre-bootloader which will, in turn, chain load (without any form of signature check) a predesignated boot loader which will, in turn, boot Linux (or any other operating system).”

Red Hat too was bamboozled by Microsoft, the longtimes convicted thug. This is what happens when you become UEFI ‘partners’ with the monopolist rather than file an antitrust complaint. As Larabel
puts it:

Linux Foundation Struggles With Microsoft UEFI Signing

James Bottomley has written about the problems being faced by the Linux Foundation in having a Microsoft-approved validly-signed UEFI pre-bootloader.

There’s many hurdles to jump from Microsoft and Verisign/Symantec for obtaining a valid signing key. There’s third-party open-source tools for handling much of the signing process, but in the end Windows is still needed due to a Silverlight-based file uploader for the UEFI binary. The Mono-based Moonlight doesn’t work with the Silverlight uploader. After uploading the cabinet file for signing, there’s a seven-stage process.

That is how bad it is. Pogson puts it more crudely:

M$ Sabotages UEFI “Secure Boot” for Linux Foundation

[...]

I have always thought it was a mistake to do anything in GNU/Linux the M$’s way. They will do anything to prevent GNU/Linux being more widely accessible for consumers. Expect nothing but “accidents”, failures, disasters and the inevitable legal suits to result. They’re all good for M$ keeping the cash-cow flowing a bit longer.

Muktware says:

Microsoft may have attracted some headlines and discussion on Slashdot for being a ‘sponsor’ at the Linux Foundation’s Europe event LinuxCon. But this sponsor is not giving the Linux Foundation any special treatment when it comes to UEFI Secure boot.

If you remember the Linux Foundation earlier announced their workaround for the UEFI Secure boot for the Linux community. That’s getting delayed.

James Bottomley, chair of the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board, explains in his blog the ‘technical’ and ‘paper’ challenges there are to get a Microsoft signed key and implement it.

He detailed the entire painful process to get a Microsoft signed key. While is extremely easy to pay $99 and get a Verisign verified key the rest of the process is quite daunting and challenging, which also requires one to use Microsoft technologies.

[...]

The foundation somehow managed to create and upload the file which had to go through seven stages and “unfortunately, the first test upload got stuck in stage 6 (signing the files).”

There were some email exchanges between Microsoft and Bottomley to sort the problem but at the moment the cart is stuck in mud.

We’re still waiting for Microsoft to give the Linux Foundation a validly signed pre-bootloader. When that happens, it will get uploaded to the Linux Foundation website for all to use.

UEFI apologists hopefully learned their lesson by now. Microsoft has crooks trying to save Windows by breaking Linux. █

Permalink A Single Comment      Send this to a friend

Freiburg Should Use ODF Only, Just Like Portugal

Posted in Europe, Formats, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Standard at 4:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: OOXML helps Microsoft derail Free software adoption in the German public sector while Portugal’s goes ODF-only

So the news says that Freiburg will return to Office after failure to properly communicate with those who understand lock-in. IDG covered this almost exclusively and wrote: “According to the organisations, no open source experts were consulted in the process. Therefore they hoped the council would still consider a migration to a current version of LibreOffice or OpenOffice.”

Calling the Free Software Foundation Europe an “open source group” is bad, but we saw that in previous reports on the subject. The matter of fact is, a lot of issues have already been addressed:

Open source developers have already fixed three of the five major problems that are limiting support by open source office suites for Microsoft’s proprietary document format OOXML, reports Matthias Stürmer. The Swiss Ernst & Young IT consultant is one of those improving the open source office tools. He hopes better support for OOXML this will “help to successfully complete and maintain migrations towards open source office suites.”

Notice how OOXML always stands in the way, as Microsoft intended. Here is the call for Freiburg to stay with ODF:

Five civil groups advocating the use of free and open source by public administrations urge the German city of Freiburg to continue to use the Open Document Format as its default format for electronic documents. “Free office suites are making progress. LibreOffice today has over 60 million users worldwide.”

This week’s Tuesday evening, Freiburg’s city council is voting over a proposal to end its floundering migration of OpenOffice and to stop using the Open Document Format. Instead of ODF, the city board wants to default on Microsoft’s alternative, OOXML.

Some people who oversee Microsoft OOXML start following me in Twitter, so I guess Microsoft watches us ODF proponents very closely. Andy Updegrove has great news from Portugal:

According to a press release issued today by the Portuguese Open Source Business Association (reproduced in full at the end of this blog entry), the government of Portugal has decided to approve a single editable, XML-based document format for use by government, and in public procurement. And that format is not OOXML.

Here is a news report in English. After those Portugal OOXML scandals we sure expect some corruption from Microsoft. Here are some observers who should keep an eye on Microsoft's thugs. A timely reminder from Portugal:

• The Confessions of a Microsoft Lobbyist in ECMA
• A Look Back at OOXML BRM, Stacking, ISO’s Admission of Failure
• The OSP Lie, the OOXML Bribe and Other Interesting Moves in Portugal
• Geneva BRM: Microsoft Puppet Show, Invite-only
• The ISO is Replaced by Microsoft, Long Live ISO
• Microsoft ‘Pulls a Portugal’ in Ireland (Microsoft to Decide on… Microsoft)
• Quick Mention: The Programmer’s Advantage in ODF, OOXML Coverage from Hungary
• Microsoft is Still Buying Portugal in Its Fight Against OpenDocument Format
• ISO Reform Demanded, OpenISO Formed by Norbert Bollow (Updated)
• This Just in: Sweden’s Vote on OOXML Nullified Due to That So-called ”Bribery” Incident (Updatedx3)
• Has OOXML ‘Funny Business’ Already Reached Australia and India?
• Microsoft OOXML Corruption Watch — Jason Matusow Goes Batting with FUD and Deception (Updated)
• Microsoft Continues to Cheat in the ISO
• The Microsoft OOXML ‘Corruption Train’ Reaches Denmark (Updatedx2)
• Microsoft is Outmuscling OOXML Opposition in Spain (Updatedx3)
• India to Weigh in on Real Standards and ‘Monopoly Enablers’
• Microsoft Already Plans to ‘Extend’ Its ‘Standard’; ECMA and ISO Named and Shamed
• European Commission Might Finally Intervene and Investigate Abuse
• Voters on OOXML Up for ‘Hire’ in Italy (Updated)
• Open Standards and the GPL in the United Kingdom
• The OOXML Translator is a Hoax (and so is the ISO)

Other Microsoft irregularities in Portugal can be found in:

• FullSIX and Mr. Youth LLC May Be Ruining the Web (AstroTurfing) on Microsoft’s Behalf
• Microsoft’s Dumping Strategy Versus GNU/Linux (EDGI Continued)
• Is Microsoft ‘Pulling an EDGI’ on Kerala? (Updated)
• Microsoft Imprisons the Ukraine and a South African University

ESOP says: “We must stress the importance of the whole open standards adoption process and declare our explicit support for the way the interoperability regulation was designed. On one hand, there is some pragmatism to be noticed: the list of open standards is relatively short with priority given to functions where interoperability problems are a large concern. On the other hand, pragmatism didn’t mean lost of insight: there is no more than one open standard per functional category. This is something ESOP has always defended, as a measure to prevent incompatibilities that could bring the adoption process to a failure.”

Related to this, also see:

• Silverlight/Microsoft Required for Public Procurement in Portugal
• Open Letter to the Portuguese Ministry of Education
• Microsoft’s Magalhães Laptops Scam and OOXML Scandals in Portugal Associated with Fraud?
• Microsoft is Exploiting Portuguese Taxpayers to Build Nation of ‘Addicts’
• Microsoft CEO Might Try to Shoot Down Portugal’s Open Standards Bill
• The Games Microsoft Plays in Portugal to Fight Free Software
• Eye on Microsoft: Portugal Visit, Regrets, and Vista Lies

Keep on open eye on Microsoft Portugal. █

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

Vista 8 Drives Windows Users to Other Operating Systems

Posted in Vista 8, Windows at 3:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Survey of feedback and systematic research shows that without some dirty tricks the Windows franchise will collapse

MR. Pogson says that “Few Want to Buy and Few Want to Build “8″ Tablets in UK,” based on this report which says people and companies are dissatisfied: (Surface lawsuits won’t help, will they?)

The launch of Microsoft’s Surface RT upset some OEMs and resellers (it is being sold direct) and PC vendors Samsung, Lenovo, Dell and Asus are forecasting slim global shipments, believed to be around 50,000 each.

Toshiba has launched an RT model but only in Japan, though a slider product is due to arrive soon in Europe.

But sources in the PC supply chain claim the margins on RT are “naturally lower” due to its price point, and “there is an active effort from vendors to make sure RT doesn’t stick”.

“RT is undercutting the profits that vendors hoped to make by switching from Android to Windows. There is pressure on resellers to hold out for the full Windows Pro version,” said the analyst source.

A colleague who is a Microsoft booster says: “The Microsoftie simply confirms what we’re seeing as an emerging pattern of lackluster sales.” IDG called Surface a product to avoid this Black Friday. Bold statement from the Microsoft-funded IDG.

Someone whom I follow in Diaspora asked about this article/placement: “Who is this Jack and how much money did he get for this advert?

He referred to Microsoft Jack [1, 2, 3], the foul-mouthed Microsoft booster and revisionist (like a British Enderle). When Vista 7 was released we caught him saying: “Well the initial impression is how much it [Windows 7] looks like Vista. Which I think is…uh…the thing I’m not supposed to say.”

An author who insists on not hating Microsoft does hate the Vista 8 GUI. He says:

Further, the live tiles remind of animated gifs on 90s web pages. They are fluttering and flipping and updating. Some see this as an advantage, but I don’t. I find it disorienting actually and I don’t want my operating system in perpetual motion. I grant you this could be a generational thing. I know from the commercial that Will Arnett’s 20-something assistant loves the Windows phone.

Sinofsky is said to have been fired, prompting confirmation that Vista 8 is a disaster, and a poll shows what might happen next:

This Survey Is Devastating For Microsoft: 42% Of Windows Users Plan To Switch To Apple

[...]

As tech guru Jean-Louis Gassee points out in his weekly note, the survey also suggests that Windows 8 has created a huge opportunity for Apple to convert a lot more Windows users to Apple products.

Notice their gross omission of Android, Linux, and GNU or BSD distributions. Anyway, a recovering Linux advocate says:

Microsoft XP’ed the Bed with Windows 8

[...]

Well guess what. Now Windows doesn’t look like Windows and people are not happy about it. From Aunt Tilly to the Boardroom at MegaCorp, the opinion of Windows 8 isn’t very good.

This time, Microsoft might hold the line. Some of my peers believe that MS will take the short-term hit in order to gain long-term dominance. They will not capitulate to public opinion and forge ahead with their New Vision in computing.

Personally, and I’m just makin’ an observation here…..

I think Microsoft might be needing to change the bed sheets.

Vista Phone 8 is a disaster also, so Microsoft will play dirty tricks with patents, predatory pricing, bribes, and UEFI. More on that later.. █

Permalink A Single Comment      Send this to a friend

The Microsoft Lobby Uses Regulators as Weapon Against Google

Posted in Antitrust, Google, Microsoft, Search at 3:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Best tool for a hack job

Summary: Microsoft and its proxies incite regulators against Google

I am hardly a Google user myself, but when it comes to hack jobs I mind a lot. Microsoft with its proxies is trying to incite the government against Google (search) as a last resort in the search battle. There is some news which suggests lobbying win for Microsoft:

Last month, Reuters reported that four of the five FTC commissioners had concluded that Google has used its search market dominance to harm its rivals. Agency investigators circulated a draft memo recommending legal action against Google. Last week, Bloomberg reported that the FTC has delivered “an ultimatum” to Google demanding that the search giant offer a plan to settle the investigation, or face a lawsuit. If no settlement is reached, the FTC will press ahead in the coming days with a vote that will determine whether the commission files a lawsuit. If that happens, the lawsuit would be the most dramatic action taken by the U.S. government against a major technology company since the Department of Justice challenged Microsoft in the 1990s.

“If you don’t think you can win,” writes Pamela Jones, “maybe you should think about whether you really have a case? And leaking threats when you know you don’t think you can win is lame. What’s really going on here?”

She quotes Danny Sullivan’s article which defends Google by saying that no government intervention is needed. The action came after heavy anti-Google lobbying from dubious groups, including some from Microsoft proxies. FairSearch is a Microsoft front, for example, a fact that articles like this one conveniently overlook. Read this:

Earlier today, the group FairSearch published a blog post outlining potential remedies that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should consider in its antitrust inquiry into Google’s practices. FairSearch is a group of companies that complain to regulators that Google’s superior performance is the product of “anticompetitive” behavior. FairSearch members include Microsoft, Expedia, Hotwire, Foundem, and TripAdvisor.

FairSearch’s post today lists behavioral and structural remedies, along with steps for ensuring implementation of these remedies. We’ve written extensively on remedies proposed by FairSearch, refuting over a dozen of them. Google is a client of my firm, but I do not speak for the company, only for myself.

Nonetheless, I want to address FairSearch’s latest offering, though many are recycled without the slightest improvement.

FairSearch’s proposals are, at points, hopelessly vague. I have to guess at the proposals, to some extent, in order to refute them. As a result, this post is more detailed than the one it refutes.

[...]

Indeed, these flawed remedies demonstrate that Google’s competitors are not interested in competing in the marketplace to win over customers. Instead they want to use the power of government to handicap the strongest of the pack, to the benefit of the weaker competitors. That’s a raw deal for consumers, and a heavy blow against innovation.

Microsoft never cared about innovation. Destruction is the motto. Microsoft does whatever it takes to just eliminate competition. █

Permalink A Single Comment      Send this to a friend

Regulators Target Patent Trolls But Lose Sight of Patent Cartels

Posted in Law, Patents at 3:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Action is finally being taken against patent abuse, even though it does not go far enough

TECHRIGHTS has gathered a lot of information on Intellectual Ventures and so did a paper from early in the year, which states accurately: [via Stefano Zacchiroli, the Debian Project Leader]

The new mass aggregator, however, is an entirely different beast. To begin with, funding sources for mass aggregators include some very successful and respectable organizations, including manufacturing companies such as Apple, eBay, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, and Sony, as well as academic institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania and Notre Dame, and other entities such as the World Bank and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Nations such as China, France, South Korea, and Taiwan even have their own mass aggregators to varying degrees.

Moreover, the acquisition appetites and patent supply sources are quite interesting. Mass aggregators may have portfolios that range across vastly different areas of innovation from computers to telecommunications to biomedicine to nanotechnology. In some of the acquisition activity, mass aggregators purchase large chunks, and even the majority, of an operating company’s patents and patent applications. They typically pay cash up front, as well as a share of any future profits generated from asserting the patents against anyone other than the selling manufacturer. Mass aggregators have engaged in other unusual acquisition approaches as well, including purportedly purchasing the rights to all future inventions by researchers at universities in developing countries. Other acquisition approaches purportedly include targeted purchases of patents that are of particular interest to the mass aggregators’ investors.

The types of returns promised to investors and the types of benefits offered to participants are also quite different from garden-variety non-practicing entities, as are some of the tactics used in organizing the entities and in asserting the patents. Finally, the scale itself is simply mind-boggling. Mass aggregators operate on a scale and at a level of sophistication and complexity that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. They have taken the prototype strategies pioneered by a prior generation of non-practicing entities and changed them into some of the cleverest strategies yet seen in the intellectual property rights field.

The goal of this article is to shed some light on mass aggregators. We hope to provide some understanding of the nature of the change, to analyze its economics and implications, and to offer some normative considerations. In the descriptive section, we focus on the oldest and largest of the mass aggregators, Intellectual Ventures, which has gone to great lengths to maintain secrecy. Working from public sources and investing thousands of hours of research, we offer a detailed picture of the entity, tracing through approximately 1300 shell companies and thousands of patents. The section also describes in brief form several other mass aggregators, including ones that are public companies.

These are cartels and they should be made illegal. They inflate prices and deflate innovation. We dealt with the subject before.

There is an article in the BBC titled “Phone patents: An absurd battle“. iophk says it proposes patent trolls as a solution and adds: “I am surprised that Intellectual Ventures was not promoted. That’s one of the biggest if not the biggest” (it is).

I cannot read this article in the UK. Neither can Glyn Moody, who wrote: “wow, this is fun: the #BBC won’t let me access the bbc.com site ‘cos I’m in UK – http://bit.ly/Q5SK2Q ironic much?”

Good ol’ BBC is still serving plutocrats, not taxpayers who fund it obligatorily.

Here is what Groklaw quotes from this article: “One reason boils down to the nature of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, according to Daniel O’Connor, a self-styled anti-trust and internet policy wonk as well as senior director of public policy at the Computer and Communications Industry Association. He says that software is a particularly active area for patents, especially anything to do with telecommunications, semiconductors and 4G data networks. Software patents are also particularly broad and vague, and that makes infringement difficult to avoid. “That creates the conditions for a kind of patent perfect storm,” O’Connor says….

“[M]ost of these patents don’t just make a single claim to a particular intellectual property right – on average each patent makes more like 20 such claims. That means that this collection of 250,000 patents actually describes about five million restrictions on what mobile device makers can do while they design a new model. Realistically an individual may be able to keep five, 10 or maybe 20 restrictions in mind when designing a new feature for a mobile device, but probably not 50 or 500. And five million? Not a chance.”

The solution should be to rethink patents, not create cartels with them. Innovative Automation (IA), a company named in a comical way like IV, shows that even cartel members are not safe. Apple got sued while still assembling a new part of the patent cartel:

Back on September tenth we posted a report revealing the fact that Apple had acquired 434 LTE centric patents. One of the original sources of our report stated that Rockstar Bidco, a company that Apple holds the majority stake in, acquired 116 LTE patents from Nortel, giving them a total of 434 LTE patents. It’s now been revealed that Apple had been acquiring even more patents over the summer and the list is extensive.

In a report filed yesterday, Business Insider listed a link to the US Patent Office which linked to a series of patent assignments between Nortel, Rockstar Bidco and Apple. The list totaled up to 1375 patents originating from Nortel, with the vast majority of them being assigned to Apple. Some of the listed patents have yet to be assigned to Apple as shown here and here.

Google’s talking points from the patents team focus on trolls rather than the cartel as their problem. They are focusing on trolls instead of the system as a whole because the want Google to become part of the cartel, hence part of the problem. That’s how patent lawyers think. Regulators are said to be taking a look at this problem:

U.S. antitrust authorities are examining whether specialized patent-holding firms—or “trolls” to their detractors—are disrupting competition in high-tech markets, opening a new front in a long-standing Silicon Valley battle.

“There’s a possibility of competitive harm here,” said Joseph Wayland, who served as the Justice Department’s acting antitrust chief until last week, when he stepped down to return to private practice. Mr. Wayland said officials are devoting “huge energy, particularly at a senior level” to this and other antitrust issues surrounding patents.

Other reports like this one from Reuters say that the US-leaning ITC is also taking a look:

The US International Trade Commission will review a judge’s decision which found that Apple did not violate patents owned by Samsung in making the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad.

An administrative law judge at the ITC had said in a preliminary ruling in September that Apple was innocent of violating the patents. The ITC, which could have opted to simply uphold the judge’s decision, said that it would take up the matter. A final decision is expected in January.

The FTC focuses on patent trolls and not cartels:

US antitrust enforcers are getting mighty interested in patent trolls. The Federal Trade Commission has even taken to calling these lawsuit-happy companies “patent assertion entities,” or PAEs.

“There’s a possibility of competitive harm here,” said Joseph Wayland, who was the head of antitrust enforcement at the Justice Department until last week. Wayland just left the government for private practice, and he told the Wall Street Journal there is “huge energy, particularly at a senior level” being spent on scrutinizing the intersection of patents and antitrust.

The FTC and the Department of Justice announced today they will host a public forum on December 10 to study the issue more closely. The speakers include IP lawyers, law professors specializing in these so-called PAEs, and even officers of high-profile patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures and Round Rock Research LLC. Executives from companies that have been critical of patent-holding companies, such as Cisco and Rackspace, will also be featured.

Here is more:

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) and US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are opening informal hearings next month which will look into the question of whether specialised patent-holding firms, also known as “patent trolls” to many, are disrupting competition in technology markets. Concerns that non-practising entities (NPEs) – companies that hold patents but do not make use of them – cause problems in the market have existed for some time. The traditional “troll”, a small company holding a handful of patents, has in recent years been joined by the huge patent-holding corporations who buy up hundreds of patents. The aim of the NPEs is to get licence revenue from companies who they claim are infringing the patents they hold.

They ought to look at the cartels, not just trolls. We’ll make this point again at the end of the night (addressing the USPTO as a whole, not just the ITC). The patent system is as inherently corrupt as the political system, which corporations control at people’s expense and to people’s detriment. █

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend