08.01.13
Corporations Still Focus on Patent Trolls While the Public (People) Worry About Patent Scope
Summary: Another reminder of the disparity and the difference between corporate interests and public interests when it comes to patent policy
Serving large corporations is the norm for a government that’s funded by them. Google wants a crackdown on trolls, based on this new report, but what about software patents? To quote this report: “Dozens of major U.S. companies, including Morgan Stanley, Google, Wal-Mart and Dell, on Tuesday urged lawmakers to pass bills that they said would protect new products against “extortive demands” on patents.”
“Levy writes for a good blog called “patent progress” (worth following) and he has been focusing on patent scope for quite some time.”But what about people? Corporations are not people. Why always obey the will of huge companies and not do anything about software patents? As Matt Levy put it the other day: “The only thing that would change is whether the PTO can fully review a broader set of patents. If one agrees that “patent quality” is a problem, then it only makes sense to let the experts (i.e. the PTO) help to fix that quality problem.”
Levy writes for a good blog called “patent progress” (worth following) and he has been focusing on patent scope for quite some time. Now that even cures for cancer in the form of genetic data (naturally-occurring) get patented, this is an ethical issue and this new article tells us about “An effort to build a public database of BRCA gene variants” (genetics are being patented). This is a catastrophe even greater than software patents because it kills many people. Here is a new example of software patents doing their thing:
MotionPoint Corp., a Coconut Creek-based tech company, recently lost a verdict to New York-based TransPerfect Global over patents on its website translation software.
The jury verdict was $1 million, but the impact of the verdict remains unclear.
Who benefits from this? Neither developers nor users of software. For sure it is patent scope that’s the biggest problem; the debate about the patent system got warped in recent years. █
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