Patent Payday
,----[ Quote ]
| But while Cannata and patent investors like Rembrandt claim to be protecting
| the rights of inventors, their detractors believe they are simply
| well-financed patent trolls--a derisive term used to describe companies with
| no operations other than suing big business over patents. Concern over the
| practice has reached Washington, D.C., where both the courts and lawmakers
| have been moving to protect corporate America from patent-related litigation.
`----
http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/11/patents-legal-rembrandt-biz-cz_nv_0212patent.html
http://tinyurl.com/2qjh9z
Patent Failure
,----[ Quote ]
| Princeton University Press
| March 2008
|
| In the last several years, business leaders, policymakers, and inventors have
| complained to the media and to Congress that today’s patent system stifles
| innovation instead of fostering it. But like the infamous patent on the
| peanut butter and jelly sandwich, much of the cited evidence about the patent
| system is pure anecdote—making realistic policy formation difficult. Is the
| patent system fundamentally broken, or can it be fixed with a few modest
| reforms? Moving beyond rhetoric, Patent Failure provides the first
| authoritative and comprehensive look at the economic performance of patents
| in forty years. James Bessen and Michael Meurer ask whether patents work well
| as property rights, and, if not, what institutional and legal reforms are
| necessary to make the patent system more effective.
`----
http://truthhappens.redhatmagazine.com/2008/02/11/patent-failure/
Patent reform coming down to the wire
,----[ Quote ]
| It may make little difference in the long run, but you might learn a lot
| about how the next President feels about technology if they are forced to
| vote on patent reform.
`----
http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=1999
Related and recent:
My Dumb Software Patents
,----[ Quote ]
| The first patent was provisionally filed in 2000 and has been "in process"
| for the last 8 years. Yes, I said 8 years. Many think that Software Patents
| are stupid. I conceptually agree with this statement. Having spent what seems
| like millions of hours constructing these, baby sitting them, defending them;
| it is really all wasted time and effort, at least in a conceptual sense.
| There is no way for a software engineer or system architect to have any idea
| what exists out there to either copy or avoid (whatever the motivation).
`----
http://falseprecision.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/02/my-dumb-softwar.html
Related:
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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