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Cephalon spent $512,000 on lobbying in first quarter
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| The Frazer, Pa.-based company lobbied Congress on a bill aimed at updating
| the U.S. patent system. Software and computer companies supported the bill
| that passed the House last year, saying it would cut down on frivolous
| patent-infringement lawsuits. But the pharmaceutical industry argued it would
| weaken patent protections on drugs by reducing infringement penalties. The
| bill has stalled in the Senate.
`----
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/fn/5785480.html
It's them who are responsible for opposing a reform (pharmas).
Math You Can't Use
,----[ Quote ]
| Unlike Tim Lee, I haven't read Ben Clemens' book Math You Can't Use. Indeed,
| I just now heard of it for the first time. But good title! And it's a good
| subject for a book -- the case against software patents.
`----
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/05/math_you_cant_use.php
Analysis: appeals court unlikely to fix software patent mess
,----[ Quote ]
| Predictably, this has led to a flood of new patent applications. Microsoft
| held about 600 patents the day State Street was decided. Today it holds
| nearly 9,000 patents. Amazon's much-derided one-click patent was approved the
| year after the decision. Patent litigation in the software industry has
| exploded with firms facing lawsuits over patents covering extremely broad
| software concepts such as wireless e-mail, web embedding, and converting IP
| addresses to phone numbers. Technically, these patents cover general purpose
| computers executing the algorithms described in the patent rather than the
| algorithms themselves. But because no one executes such algorithms with pen
| and paper, the net result has been to give the patent holders effective
| monopolies on the algorithms themselves.
|
| [...]
|
| Several parties submitted briefs urging the Federal Circuit to reject
| software patents outright, but none of them were invited to participate in
| the oral arguments.
`----
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/software-patent-problems-abound.ars
Last week:
[ffii] McCreevy wants to legalise Software Patents via a US-EU patent treaty
,----[ Quote ]
| 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.
`----
http://lwn.net/Articles/282000/
The ghost of software patents is back!
,----[ Quote ]
| 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.
`----
http://osindia.blogspot.com/2008/05/ghost-of-software-patents-is-back.html
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