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A Czar for the Digital Peasants
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| One sure sign of a lack of political vision is a rise in the number of pieces
| of acronymic legislation. After September 11, the US Congress passed the
| euphoniously named “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing
| Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act” the
| initials of which spell out “USA – Patriot.” The Patriot Act is a pretty bad
| piece of legislation, but at least its drafters worked hard on the acronyms
| so that opponents could be labelled “anti-patriot” – a perfect level of
| analysis for Fox News. Admittedly, in this administration, having public
| officials torturing acronyms rather than detainees might be counted as a
| plus, but I still find the whole practice distasteful. I'd suggest that
| politicians vow to vote against any piece of legislation with its own
| normatively loaded acronym, no matter how otherwise appealing. It might make
| them focus a little more on the content.
|
| In any event, Congress has been at it again. The House just passed, and the
| Senate is considering, the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for
| Intellectual Property Act of 2008 – or “Pro-IP” Act. (If it passes, a version
| is sure to be urged on Europe as a matter of “harmonisation.”) Are you
| pro-intellectual property? Then surely you must be for this piece of
| legislation! The name says it all.
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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/14aacbc8-41e1-11dd-a5e8-0000779fd2ac.html
The Pitfalls of Patent Searches
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| You can learn a lot by searching patents, but what you learn can sometimes be
| dangerous. If a court should ever find that you infringed on a patent
| knowingly, you might have to pay triple the damages, together with attorney
| fees.
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http://spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6259
Recent:
[ffii] McCreevy wants to legalise Software Patents via a US-EU patent treaty
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| Brussels, 13 May 2008 -- European Commissioner McCreevy is pushing for a
| bilateral patent treaty with the United States. This Tuesday 13 May in
| Brussels, White House and European representatives will try to adopt a
| tight roadmap for the signature of a EU-US patent treaty by the end of
| the year. Parts of the proposed treaty will contain provision on
| software patents, and could legalise them on both sides of the Atlantic.
|
| "TEC talks are the current push for software patents. The US want to
| eliminate the higher standards of the European Patent Convention. The
| bilateral agenda is dictated by multinationals gathered in the
| Transatlantic Economic Business Dialogue (TABD). When you have a look
| who is in the Executive Board of the TABD, you find not a single
| European SME in there", says Benjamin Henrion, a Brussels based patent
| policy specialist.
|
| The Transatlantic Economic Council (TEC) which comprises EU and US high
| level representatives put a substantive harmonisation of patent law on
| its agenda. Substantive patent law covers what is patentable or not. The
| attempt to impose the low US standards on Europe via the Substantive
| Patent Law Treaty (SPLT) process utterly failed at the World
| Intellectual Property Organisation. Also progress in the WIPO B+
| subgroup (without development nations) could not be reached.
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http://lwn.net/Articles/282000/
The ghost of software patents is back!
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| Life is never easy for an open source evangelist. The OOXML drama came to a
| close on 2nd April 2008 and we were on to our next issue -- software patents.
| The Draft Patent Manual might end up bringing software patents through the
| back door. this would be surprising because the Indian parliament explicitly
| rejected software patents in the Patent Amendment Act 2005. In this blog, I
| am including extracts from a letter that I sent to the Patent Office on 11th
| April 2008. The deadline for comments was 15th April 2008.
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http://osindia.blogspot.com/2008/05/ghost-of-software-patents-is-back.html
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