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Open source software as prior art in patent oppositions
,----[ Quote ]
| You and your readers may be interested in
| six oppositions currently pending at the
| EPO. The opposed patents are those subject
| to the appeal decision T424/03 cited by the
| president in the referral. The patents in
| question are EP0717354, EP1028372,
| EP1028373, EP1028374, EP1028376 and
| EP1028377 ("Expanded Clipboard Formats")
| granted to Microsoft Corporation.
|
| The principal ground for opposition is
| novelty and, interestingly, the prior art is
| open source software. These oppositions may
| also be of interest to the open source
| community who may make observations to the
| EPO under Article 115 EPC".
`----
http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2009/10/open-source-software-as-prior-art-in.html
An Entrepreneur Weighs In
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| In closing I would like to point out that if you
| affirm software/technical processes as patentable a
| firestorm of litigation will ensue, resulting in a
| massive and unjust transfer of resources. The
| resulting effect on innovation in the US would lead
| to the inevitable question: Why would we expose our
| company to the risk of crushing litigation in the
| United States when our markets are just as
| accessible through the Internet?
`----
http://www.againstmonopoly.org/index.php?perm=593056000000001739
Recent:
NPEs and Abstract Patents
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| For a process to be patentable, it must involve a physical transformation to
| a different state or thing, or must be tied to a particular machine.
|
| What does that mean? The court gave examples indicating that software would
| be patentable if it represented physical objects undergoing physical
| transformation. However, it expressly reserved judgment on the alternative
| test: whether a general-purpose computer was "a particular machine." If so,
| of course, all software processes would be patentable.
|
| Not the brightest of lines, but the court didn't flinch from trying to draw
| one, despite arguments that patent lawyers would manage to circumvent any
| court-imposed limitations. The Bilski decision leaves a lot up in the air,
| but it affirms that judges will draw limits, even around patentable subject
| matter, and it offers a modest deflating of the patent bubble. It eliminates
| some of the worst excesses spawned by State Street without provoking a
| backlash. And it has breathed new life into public debate of where the limits
| should be. For those who care about how and where the line should be drawn,
| some colleagues and I have organized a conference at the Brookings
| Institution on January 14, the Limits of Abstract Patents in an Intangible
| Economy.
|
| Just as the debate has come alive in the U.S., it has also resurfaced in
| Europe three years after a proposed directive on software patents went down
| to defeat in the European Parliament. The President of the European Patent
| Office has asked the EPO's Enlarged Board of Appeals to answer four questions
| about the patentability of computer programs. The European Patent Convention
| has always specifically precluded patents on certain abstract processes,
| including computer programs and business methods, but then in the next
| section it says that these exclusions only apply to computer programs,
| etc. "as such." So decades have been spent trying to figure out what "as
| such" really means and what kind of "technical" contribution is needed to
| pass muster.
`----
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-kahin/npes-and-abstract-patents_b_156350.html
Is it Patentable?
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| Two months ago, in In re Bilski, the Federal Circuit rejected the notion that
| anything that produces a "useful, concrete, and tangible result" is
| potentially patentable. Instead, to be patent-eligible, an idea must be "tied
| to a particular machine or apparatus," or it must "transform a particular
| article into a different state or thing." (To qualify for a patent, it also
| has to meet various other requirements, such as being novel.)
|
| As to transformation, the court noted that not just any transformation will
| do. The transformation "must be central to the purpose of the claimed
| process," and the "articles" transformed must either be "physical objects or
| substances" or "representative of physical objects or substances."
`----
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/12/is-it-patentable
The post-Bilski era begins
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| The In re Bilski (545 F.3d 943 [Fed. Cir. 2008]; hereâs a PDF of the
| decision) court decision placed significant new limits on so-called âprocessâ
| or âbusiness methodâ patents, which possible implications for many software
| patents.
`----
http://bfwa.com/2008/12/19/the-post-bilski-era-begins/
The Post-Bilski Era Gets Underway
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| A set of pharmaceutical process patents for 'evaluating and improving the
| safety of immunization schedules' (Classen v. Biogen et al.; see US Patents
| 6,420,139; 6,638,379; 5,728,385; 5,723,283) were held to be invalid due to
| unpatentability. The decision was appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the
| Federal Circuit, but was upheld with a terse citation to In re Bilski (which
| decision we discussed here).
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http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/20/1811246
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