USPTO Close to Rejecting Plug-in Patent
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The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) moved a step closer to overturning a Web browser plug-in patent at the heart of a multi-million dollar dispute between Microsoft (Quote, Chart) and Eolas Technologies.
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BRUSSELS -- The European Union's (E.U.'s) planned software patent rules represent a major threat to interoperability unless specific exemptions are made to the legislation, participants at a conference on the issue heard on Tuesday.
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The US Patent and Trademark Office has preliminarily rejected a Microsoft patent on a system for recognizing computer files, a victory for &quot;open source&quot; advocates
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Copyright add-on fails to find consensus A controversial new intellectual property right due to be created by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has been successfully opposed by a coalition of web activists and the technology industry.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Patent reform legislation before the U.S. Congress would kill the value of patents and allow companies from other countries to steal U.S. intellectual property, a group of inventors said Thursday. About 20 inventors and U.S. company executives, visiting Washington, D.C., encouraged Congress to defeatÂ the Patent Reform Act, a version of which passed the House of Representatives earlier this month. The Senate has not yet voted on its version of the bill. The legislation "will weaken the patent system," said Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway and the AutoSyringe. "It will devalue patents. It will be a disincentive for people to invest in the future." Several large tech vendors, including Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco, support the legislation, which would allow courts to change they way they assess damages in patent infringement cases. Currently, courts generally consider the value of the entire product when a small piece of the product infringes a patent, and the legislation would allow courts to base damages only on the value of the infringing piece. The legislation would also allow a new way to challenge patents after they've been granted. Supporters say the bill is needed because patent infringement lawsuits have gotten out of hand. It's too easy for patent holders to sue and collect huge damage awards when a small piece of a tech product is found to infringe, supporters argue. Microsoft this month praised the House passage of the legislation, saying lawmakers voted to "support American innovation and to preserve incentives for progress." But Peter Volanakis, president and COO of Corning, said the legislation would be an invitation for its competitors in Asia to repeatedly challenge his company's patents. "This encourages infringement, plain and simple," he said. "It is much easier to infringe patents with this legislation." The patent reform legislation would also "undermine" Corning's ability to invest in new products, Volanakis added. Steve Perlman, inventor of WebTV and lead developer of Apple's QuickTime, said he was surprised to learn of the legislation when he read of the House passage of the bill. As he's begun to contact lawmakers about his opposition to the legislation, their staffers are "stunned" to hear of tech startups that are opposed to the bill, Perlman said. Small inventors and startups were mostly ignored during hearings on the bill, Perlman added. One of the goals of the bill is to harmonize U.S. patent laws with the rest of the world. But the U.S. now has the best environment for startups and entrepreneurs, Perlman said. "I don't want to have the startup economy they have," he said. "I want the one we have." Perlman, founder and CEO of Rearden, and Kamen, founder of DEKA Research & Development, both said changes to the U.S. patent system are needed. But the legislation largely doesn't address the real needs -- more patent examiners and more money for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, they said. Perlman has a patent he applied for five years ago still awaiting examination, he said. "Let's first make the system we've got today work the way it's supposed to work," Perlman said. Congress should also wait to see the effects of a May 2006 Supreme Court ruling, in which justices overturned the long-held practice of issuing injunctions against infringing products in nearly all patent cases, Perlman said. That ruling should have a large effect on so-called patent trolls, he said. "There already has been a huge change" in U.S. patent law because of the Supreme Court ruling, he said.
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Forget about Tivoization. How about adding a clause to the next version of the GPL that counters Novellization? The clause would say (in proper legalese), that if any code infringes on intellectual property or patents held by third parties, and the third parties take legal action, the contributors of the offending code assume 100% liability.  In short, if Novell injects Microsoft IP into open source and Microsoft wants to sue, it must sue Novell and nobody else, because Novell assumes liability under this new license.  This would render any "promise not to sue the end customer" agreement with Novell meaningless.
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(InfoWorld) - U.S. technology vendors submitted five patent applications for last Friday's launch of a Web site that allows the public to review proposals before patents are granted. Less than a week later, the public had submitted claims of previous inventions that could invalidate each one. The prior art submissions may not pan out, but if they do, that's OK with the technology vendors. Prior art refers to existing inventions. "It's not a negative if we don't get a patent that we don't deserve," said Manny Schecter, associate general counsel for IBM Corp., an early supporter of the Peer-to-Patent project. "We don't want to have a false sense of security that we have a valuable asset that we don't really have." Peer-to-Patent's exposure of prior art will weed out patents that would likely face challenges down the line, added Curt Rose, associate general counsel for Hewlett-Packard Co. "We don't want to get patents issued that aren't valid," he said. "That's just a waste of time and money and resources for us and everybody else." Peer-to-Patent is a year-long pilot program offered through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy. The pilot, which covers patent applications for computer architecture, software and information security, launched June 15 with the support of several tech vendors. IBM, HP, Intel Corp. and Red Hat Inc. each submitted patent applications to help launch the program. The program has multiple goals, chief among them to weed out invalid patents, said Beth Noveck, a professor at the New York Law School who originally proposed the program in July 2005. Many tech vendors have pushed Congress to fix what they see as a broken patent system, and one of the biggest concerns is that overworked USPTO examiners grant too many undeserving patents. One goal is to "improve the quality of patents by providing the patent office with more and better information about inventions for which applications are filed," Noveck said. "We want to prevent the issuance of undeserving patent claims." Another goal is to make USPTO "more accountable and transparent to the technology community," she added. Supporters of Peer-to-Patent may be the first example of social networking being used in a government application. "It brings the strength of the community to the patent examination process," said HP's Rose. "So the examiners can make the best examination they can, which ultimately results in better patents." In the first week, IBM's patent application in the pilot, called "database staging area read-through or forced flush with dirty notification," has generated four claims of prior art as well as some discussion on a message board attached to the application. Peer-to-Patent allows the public to discuss patent applications and upload examples of prior art. Then, members of the site select the top examples of prior art for each patent application and the top 10 are forwarded to USPTO. One advantage for companies using the pilot is that they will have their patents reviewed within a year, instead of the traditional four-year waiting period. Under Noveck's original proposal, inventors who decided not to use the Peer-to-Patent review would get patents that were valid for a shorter length of time than those who used Peer-to-Patent, but that's not part of the pilot. The pilot has gained praise from some members of the open-source software community, in addition to large tech vendors. Bad patents hurt open-source and free software projects partly because those projects often aren't part of prior art searches at the USPTO, said Pamela Jones, founder and editor of Groklaw , a Web site focused on open-source and free software legal issues. No open-source and free software prior art database exists, and it's now nearly impossible to write major new software packages without getting into a patent dispute, Jones said on a video on the Peer-to-Patent site. "I think of this project as spraying insecticide on stupid patents before they can multiply," Jones added. "And your knowledge of prior art is the bug spray."
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A gas pedal lawsuit before the U.S. Supreme Court could make it harder for inventors to get patents.
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N-Data is its parent company's keeper The US Federal Trade Commission is barring a patent-squatting firm from raising its royalty rates for a now-standard Ethernet technology.â¦
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Gives Microsoft a chance to prove that Eolas' patent for browser plug-ins should not be valid.
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Ponders withdrawing support for non-stickered product
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IN A preliminary ruling, the US government has rejected Microsoft&#39;s 1996 patent on technology for saving files on computers using easy-to-remember names.
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Import injunction sought while patent violation case pends
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Less than patently obvious England's Court of Appeal has upheld a ruling that two software-related patents were invalid. Oil giant Halliburton's attempts to patent in the UK a software system for designing drill bits has failed.â¦
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Bloomberg News broke the news yesterday that Microsoft will be allowed to argue that patents held by research firm Eolas Technologies regarding the ability to embed functionality in a Web browser page are invalid, when a retrial of Eolas' long-running patent suit begins on July 9.
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A campaign to raise awareness about software patents has found strong opposition to their introduction in the United Kingdom.
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They are asking the European Union Council to reject this proposal. They claim that software patent directive would be harmful to the European economy.