Patentability Of Business Model And Software Patents Comes Under Court Scrutiny
,----[ Quote ]
| CAFC has agreed to a full court hearing to examine the scope of what can be
| patented. It may sound like a technicality, but it could be a very big deal.
| Going back on the earlier State Street ruling could effectively knock out
| many business model patents and software patents, restoring at least some
| (though, certainly not all) sanity to the patent system, especially in the
| technology world.
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080215/174009268.shtml
Bilski: Full CAFC to Reexamine the Scope of Subject Matter Patentability
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| Whether the claimed subject matter is not patent-eligible because it
| constitutes an abstract idea or mental process; when does a claim that
| contains both mental and physical steps create patent-eligible subject
| matter?
`----
http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2008/02/bilski-full-caf.html
Related:
Critic of Software Patents Wins Nobel Prize in Economics
.----[ Quote ]
| doom writes "You've probably already heard that the Nobel Prize
| for Economics was given to three gents who were working on advances
| in mechanism design theory. What you may not have heard is what one
| of those recipients was using that theory to study: 'One recent
| subject of Professor Maskin's wide-ranging research has been on the
| value of software patents. He determined that software was a market
| where innovations tended to be sequential, in that they were built
| closely on the work of predecessors, and innovators could take many
| different paths to the same goal. In such markets, he said, patents
| might serve as a wall that inhibited innovation rather than
| stimulating progress.' Here's one of Maskin's papers on the
| subject: Sequential Innovation, Patents, limitation (pdf).
`----
http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotYourRightsOnline/~3/170631743/article.pl
Mark Webbink On: Software Patents
,----[ Quote ]
| This week Mark Webbink, former Red Hat General Counsel discusses software
| patents, their absurdity and the business climate and “judicial activism”
| that helped create them.
`----
http://truthhappens.redhatmagazine.com/2007/10/19/mark-webbink-on-software-patents/
A Patent Lie
,----[ Quote ]
| Microsoft sang a very different tune in 1991. In a memo to his
| senior executives, Bill Gates wrote, "If people had understood how
| patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented,
| and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete
| standstill today." Mr. Gates worried that "some large company will
| patent some obvious thing" and use the patent to "take as much of
| our profits as they want."
`----
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/09/opinion/09lee.html
Big businesses boast of patent benefits, for small businesses
,----[ Quote ]
| A report published by an EU task force on intellectual property claims
| that small businesses benefit from a patent system, despite lacking
| almost any participation by the small business community.
|
| Instead, the report, titled IPR (intellectual property rights) for
| competitiveness and innovation, was written up almost entirely by
| large corporations and the patent industry.
|
| [...]
|
| The report does note objections from the likes of patentfrei.de and
| Sun Microsystems, which were recorded at some length in the report.
| But this does not appear to have impacted the conclusion of the
| report in any way
|
| [...]
|
| Jean-Pierre Laisne, of ObjectWeb, an open source software community,
| said that he found the report useless: participants were told that
| all their contributions would be recorded but at the end only
| those of Business Software Alliance and Microsoft were used.
`----
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/99155/big-businesses-boast-of-patent-benefits-for-small-businesses.html
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