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[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/
More in this slideshow:
http://www.slideshare.net/zoobab/euepo
And obligatory bashing of a conceited Microsoft patent troll:
The Delusions Of Nathan Myhrvold
,----[ Quote ]
| And here Myhrvold is either outright lying or he's ignorant (he can let us
| know which one). First of all no one has ever said that patent litigation is
| threatening to stop all innovation. They've just said that it is slowing the
| pace of innovation. And there's plenty of evidence to support that, despite
| Myhrvold's claim that there's none. James Bessen and Michael Meurer just came
| out with a whole book detailing much of the evidence, and David Levine and
| Michele Boldrin also have a book with even more evidence. Did Myhrvold simply
| not know about these? Or is he lying to PC World?
|
| [...]
|
| I'm sure Myhrvold is a smart guy -- and he may truly believe that he's
| helping inventors and changing the world -- but he's either being purposely
| misleading or he's ignorant when it comes to patents and how they interact
| with the economy.
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080511/1529011081.shtml
Recent:
Ideas Are Everywhere... So Why Do We Limit Them?
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| Gladwell uses this to talk up what Myhrvold is doing, suggesting that
| Intellectual Ventures is really about continuing that process, getting those
| ideas out there -- but he misses the much bigger point: if these ideas are
| the natural progression, almost guaranteed to be discovered by someone sooner
| or later, why do we give a monopoly on these ideas to a single discoverer?
| Myhrvold's whole business model is about monopolizing all of these ideas and
| charging others (who may have discovered them totally independently) to
| actually do something with them. Yet, if Gladwell's premise is correct (and
| there's plenty of evidence included in the article), then Myhrvold's efforts
| shouldn't be seen as a big deal. After all, if it wasn't Myhrvold and his
| friends doing it, others would very likely come up with the same thing sooner
| or later.
|
| This is especially highlighted in one anecdote in the article, of Myhrvold
| holding a dinner with a bunch of smart people... and an attorney. The group
| spent dinner talking about a bunch of different random ideas, with no real
| goal or purpose -- just "chewing the rag" as one participant put it. But the
| next day the attorney approached them with a typewritten description of 36
| different inventions that were potentially patentable out of the dinner. When
| a random "chewing the rag" conversation turns up 36 monopolies, something is
| wrong. Those aren't inventions that deserve a monopoly.
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080507/0114581051.shtml
Who is the world's biggest patent troll?
,----[ Quote ]
| In two consecutive days, The Wall Street Journal presented two different
| answers. The first is not surprising: Intellectual Ventures, the brainchild
| of ex-Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold. It's now out "to raise as much as
| $1 billion to help develop and patent inventions, many of them from
| universities in Asia."
`----
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9816163-16.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Related:
Playing Microsoft Patent Poker
,----[ Quote ]
| This time though, while Ballmer slinks away to try to con … convince people
| that Microsoft Unified Communications somehow offers people more than what
| Cisco's VOIP (voice over IP) been offering customers for years, a patent
| attack finally launches at Linux. Specifically, IP Innovation, a subsidiary
| of Acacia Technologies Group, has filed a patent infringement claim against
| Linux distributors Novell and Red Hat.
|
| So was it just timing, or was it something more? Let's take a look at the
| players.
`----
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2201579,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000616
Top Ten Patent Trolls of 2007
,----[ Quote ]
| 3. Acacia. I didn't start tracking Acacia carefully until the summer. But
| still, on my blog I have reported on over two dozen lawsuits brought by
| Acacia this year, against more than 235 defendants. That's in addition to the
| over 200 lawsuits Acacia filed in previous years against hundreds and
| hundreds of defendants. And that's not including the two lawsuits (at least)
| Acacia has filed in December against 20 more defendants (yes, Acacia, I'm
| watching you). Acacia's business model, as a publicly traded company, is to
| accumulate patents and sue as many companies as possible in order to extract
| licenses. They have a market cap of over 275 million - that pays for a lot of
| lawsuits. Unlike other trolls, Acacia tends to not focus on one court in
| particular, although they have sampled the Eastern District of Texas more
| this year than in the past.
`----
http://trolltracker.blogspot.com/2007/12/top-ten-patent-trolls-of-2007.html
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