Software Patents and USMCA (or NAFTA)
Now that not much is left of the press, especially online (we recently discussed the divestment, which was likely intentional and accelerated by social control media, slop, SLAPPs etc.), we must understand that there's not much journalism about patents or even articles which merely mention patents. I made many very lengthy videos about this in 2021 and 2022. Journalism about patents rapidly died around those years. Filling the gap were only self-promotional pages from law firms, basically trying to sell lawsuits.
"I notice that there is very little coverage of the changes to the USMCA trade treaty and *no* details, especially regarding patents," an associate said yesterday. "If it was like NAFTA there are a lot of hidden land mines regarding patents in there, including software patents."
We mentioned this a few times before. Here's what the patent maximalists in the US government (USTR) say about it, here's a Canadian angle, and something from the US Library of Congress. There's also this from Harvard and plenty of paywalled noise (promotional nonsense) from large patent litigation firms (Fenwick & West LLP in this case).
We recently pondered going back to issuing 2-3 articles per day about patents and common issues with them. The main issue is, there's a profound information vacuum. The US regime is cracking down on PTAB (i.e. trying to legitimise abstract patents again), there are still many patent trolls out there, but we don't find much coverage about this (not even from the EFF, which is busy chasing windmills). █
Image source: A map of the hemisphere
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