Digital Copyright Canada

While it would be better if patent offices did proper examinations and rejected all but the inventions most deserving of this intrusive government granted monopoly, it is great that public interest groups like the Public Patent Foundation ("PUBPAT") exist.

New York, NY -- August 26, 2010 -- The Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) announced today that it has formally asked the United States Patent and Trademark Office to reexamine eight patents held by Abbott Laboratories (NYSE: ABT) relating to the critical HIV/AIDS drug ritonavir, which is marketed by the Chicago, Illinois pharmaceutical giant under the name brand Norvir.

(Read full press release)

Some great news from New Zealand via Paul Matthews of the NZ Computer Society.

A GrokLaw article has the full story.
Update: Submission from Software Freedom Law Center

Techdirt has a useful article about how useful software patents actually are.

He points out that :
- companies will usually only patent stuff that would get disclosed anyway, relying on trade secret protection for the rest;
- Microsoft tells their employees to "never search, view, or speculate about patents", partly due to the worries over "willful infringement" and partly because you wouldn't learn anything from them anyway.

A blog article by Dana Blankenhorn provides some links, including to Groklaw. I'm curious what other people have been reading, and whether they think this could be the beginning of the end of information/mental process patents?

Question: If software is distributed unbundled with any specific hardware (ie: "not tied to any machine"), then are the methods it implements patentable? I have no problem with a patent regime that applies to those shipping hardware/software bundles, but not to those simply shipping/sharing software. This would in my mind largely solve the incompatibility between software patents and FLOSS.

There seems to be more and more recognition of the idea that more and more patents aren't necessarily a good thing. This blog post points to a paper (PDF) that tries to quantify the costs of bad patents.

A ComputerWorld Canada article by Shane Schick discusses the recent non-announcement by Microsoft claiming that it would open its specifications to competitors, including FLOSS. This is Microsoft's latest attempt to get off the radar of European regulators for their monopolistic behavior, and is sound and light with no substance.

Tim Lee has a good post on TLF in which he looks at the "stickiness" of technologies and business models, i.e. how easy they are to duplicate elsewhere.

He concludes that patents on business models and on software are pointless because the thing they're trying to protect is already sticky enough and you don't need patents (which attempt to deliberately make things more sticky).

Ok, I can't do it justice, but it's worth a read anyway.

It is interesting to note that Eric S. Maskin, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and one of the 3 recipients of a Nobel Prize used the same theory to document in a paper Sequential Innovation, Patents and Imitation that patents on software are harmful innovation. See a BLOG article by Jim Bessen on the Research on Innovation site. Most economists question software patents and it is only patent lawyers and specific company executives that favor the extension of patent law from tangibles to intangibles such as software.

eWeek's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes about Steve Ballmer, the Sopranos and the protection racket, discussing why this matters.

Ballmer is sending two other hidden messages though.
...
The first is that there's something unsavory about Linux and open source.
...
that there is no innovation or creation in open source.
...
As for new ideas, open source is the new idea of the 21st century.