10.08.14
Lawyers’ Propaganda About Software Patents and a New AstroTurf Entity Called Innovation Alliance
Summary: Patent propaganda and deception from patent lawyers (among other parasites such as patent trolls) continues to flood the Web, intersecting with reports that prove them totally wrong
Generalisations are never a good thing, but the vast majority of lawyers are greedy and self-centered. I can now say this based on personal experience (I will publish details later this year). The vast majority of them can only pretend to be something else (striving for ethics) and a small majority might actually be genuinely ethical. The typical lawyer’s goal it to maximise profit, nothing else (unless it brings publicity, hence profit at some future date). Anything he or she would say (often verging on lies) is designed to align with this goal but must be disguised as something else. They’re good with words. They love money. That’s why they decided to go to law school.
“They obviously don’t like to accept the reality that software patents are on the decline.”Patent lawyers are probably worse than most lawyers because they typically serve businesses and rich people. And look at what they do; they help acquisition of monopolies. It’s engagement in class war. They obviously don’t like to accept the reality that software patents (monopolies on algorithms) are on the decline. That is why they use straw man arguments, such as tackling bogus arguments that software patents are now “dead” (they are not) or as yet another lawyer put it, “Software Patents are Only as Dead as Schrödinger’s Cat”. Nowhere have we seen anyone claiming that software patents are dead, but this pro-software patents Web site finds such a straw man arguments useful. To quote: “The environment for patent applicants and examiners that has resulted from such inconsistent treatment of Alice by the USPTO is one in which neither examiners nor applicants have clear guidance about how the USPTO is interpreting and intends to apply the Alice decision. This makes it difficult for examiners to know whether and how to issue Alice-based rejections, and for applicants to know how to respond to such rejections. In this environment, software patents are not dead; instead, they are, like Schrödinger’s cat, in an indeterminate state, simultaneously dead and alive until examined by an observer.”
That is at least a more balanced article than previous ones from the same site, which take for instance just software patents in specific fields (like banking). It’s a lie by omission. They’re being selective to generate propaganda in their headlines and ultimately they bamboozle the world.
There is a lot of software patents propaganda following the SCOTUS decision and the large share it comes from patent law firms, as we demonstrated months ago (we gave dozens of examples). Do not let them win the information war as they did after In Re Bilski. They want to redefine what’s true.
Over in India, where software patents are definitely not legal, patent opportunists continue to pollute the press with ideas for patenting software patents and using them offensively, thanks to loopholes. Here is one ho says: “From both the cases, we can conclude that, patent rights may be enforced even though one of the elements in the claimed system or method is located outside the territory of the patent, provided that the beneficial use of the system occurs within the territory of the patent granted.”
Here is the messenger’s introduction:
About the author: Mr. Kartik Puttaiah has more than 17000 hours of experience in patent consulting.
On the other hand we have the strongly anti-software patents people, including Timothy B. Lee who published this long new series titled “Everything you need to know about software patents”. Here are the parts of this series:
What are software patents and why are they controversial?
Are software patents legal?
Why do so many patent lawsuits involve software?
Are software patents needed to promote innovation?
Could the patent office do more to scrutinize patents after they’ve been granted?
Do other countries allow patents on software?
You didn’t answer my question!
This is a good series and it helps explain where we stand. Sadly, however, Timothy B. Lee is being outweighed by a barraged of self-serving spam from law firms. That’s what the press is saturated with, maybe outnumbering writers like Timothy B. Lee by a factor of 1:5.
Meanwhile, reveals Mr. Levy (patent lawyer), there is a new lobbying group misleadingly named “Innovation Alliance”. It is actually a front for patent trolls and as Levy puts it, data does not back their claims, so they make stuff up:
The Innovation Alliance (an organization whose members include large patent trolls such as Tessera, InterDigital, and Qualcomm) has been pushing against patent reform in the name of the small inventor. They even have a Save the Inventor website set up. (And no, I’m not linking to it – you can find it easily enough.)
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Patent reform does not make it harder for legitimate patent infringement suits. And should we really avoid helping 3,700 operating companies because about a dozen patent owners a year might be slightly worse off than they are now?
Seems to me it’s up to the Innovation Alliance to prove there’s really an invention-copying problem before we derail attempts to deal with patent trolls.
As Simon Phipps from OSI points out, patent trolls are now feeling the pinch because software patents (their typical ammunition) are on the decline, which of course helps the Free software world and empowers OIN, too. It definitely is very bad for patent lawyers. Whatever is bad for patent lawyers is usually good for society (if not always). What does that say about patent lawyers? █
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