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The Cultural Gulf Between Lawyers And Technologists On Patent Law
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| On Wednesday I attended the Brookings Institution's conference on "The Limits
| of Abstract Patents in an Intangible Economy." The conference was organized
| by software patent skeptics, so that perspective has been well represented.
| But I was struck by the dramatic differences between the views of lawyers on
| the one hand (who made up the majority of the panelists and audience members)
| and the handful of technologists on the other.
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http://techdirt.com/articles/20090114/0831213405.shtml
IBM Patents Removing Leading/Trailing Blanks
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| theodp writes "With its example of how ' John Doe ' could be saved in a
| database as 'John Doe' (i.e., without leading or trailing blanks), purported
| patent reformer IBM dazzled the USPTO enough to earn Big Blue a patent last
| Tuesday for Automatically removing leading and trailing space characters from
| data being entered into a database system . The three IBM 'inventors' are
| also seeking a related patent for Retrieving data from a database system
| without leading and trailing space characters. Hey, if the patent system
| ain't broke, don't fix it!"
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090108/0230453331.shtml
Related:
EFF lawyer warns of e-learning patent dangers
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| Although Blackboard has publicly pledged not to enforce its patent
| against open-source software distributors, universities, or
| non-commercial entities, there are many gray areas that make it
| difficult to guess what is permissible and what is not. For
| instance, Schultz points out that the pledge allows Blackboard
| to sue proprietary software vendors that incorporate open-source
| software components into their offerings.
|
| Comparing Blackboard to "a schoolyard bully who holds a huge club
| over your head and promises not to hit you as long as you don't
| play with certain other kids on the playground," Schultz believes
| that Blackboard's pledge is "a nice gesture" but lacks the efficacy
| and legal significance of an official royalty-free patent license.
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http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070408-eff-lawyer-warns-of-e-learning-patent-dangers.html
http://tinyurl.com/26nko9
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