02.15.13
Obama Promises Patent Reform While Nominating a Software Patents Proponent for Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC)
Summary: Corporations-funded presidency continues to promote more of the same (if not worse) while publicly pretending to care for citizens’ plea
THERE IS no genuine intention of changing the USPTO, but the people at the USPTO sure put together a nice show. They have a ’roundtable’ — one that excludes key stakeholders. This has become a familiar sight, whether it’s a panel, a webcast of a panel, a series of articles, etc. The people who actually innovate just barely count.
The other day we saw President Obama, the person who advocates CISPA with an executive order*, putting together a nice show (at Google Plus) to save face on matters of so-called ‘IP’ (the Obama administration is heavily funded by the copyright lobby). Here is some coverage we found:
• President Obama Admits That Patent Trolls Just Try To ‘Extort’ Money; Reform Needed
As we noted yesterday, President Obama is holding a “Fireside Hangout” via Google Plus today. In a bit of a surprise turn, he took a question about patents and patent reforms, with a specific question about software patents. And, his response was surprising. He admitted that there was a problem, and that there were some companies who were clearly not doing anything other than trying to “extort” money from others. Furthermore, while he pointed to the patent reform bill that passed in 2011, he also admitted that it really only went “halfway” towards reforming the patent system as far as it needed to go. If you click on the video, this takes place around 43:30 in the video.
• Obama: We’re only halfway there on patent reform
• Obama nominates one insider, one outsider for top patent court
President Barack Obama has nominated two longtime government attorneys to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), the nation’s top patent court. One of them, Raymond Chen, has been a lawyer at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) since 1998. The other, Todd Hughes, is more of a wildcard in the patent field. His background is doing commercial litigation at the Department of Justice, where he has been since 1994.
Chen has argued some of the key patent cases on behalf of the USPTO, including In re Bilksi, in which he more or less urged the Federal Circuit to dodge the issue of when computer and software-related inventions became too abstract to get patents.
That last report is telling. Coming from the man who claims to be all about transparency while criminalising and/or leading to deaths of whistleblowers (i.e. people who antagonise abuses), we ought to assume the above is keeping up appearances. Almost 5 years ago Obama said he would close Gitmo and recently, instead of closing Gitmo in an overly belated fashion, he shut down the group made responsible for shutting down Gitmo (articles already included in our daily links).
I am not a Republican and I don't dislike the US, but to be realistic here, the same president who boosts everything ‘IP’ should not be trusted when he merely makes promises. His track record is not good. █
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*Adding to FISA, NDAA, torture, assassinations and other abuses of the Constitution from this constitutional lawyer.
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