Because Microsoft has made it part of their core business to extract patent royalties from distributors of free software (particularly on smartphones), I decided to take a look at the patent safety offered by the licence of the parts of their .NET framework that they’re releasing as free software: Microsoft Read more…
I was reading about the US Supreme Court declining to hear Soverain v. Newegg when I saw someone ask if Soverain Software was a patent troll. I started with Wikipedia’s article on Soverain Software. I’m a big Wikipedia fan, but articles about little-known companies run the risk of getting more Read more…
NPR published a really excellent article on patent trolls in the software industry. Great. They then broadcast a radio version on This American Life. Great exposure for the issue, but, it was published in the still-patented MP3 format. Sign FSF’s petition for the show to be published in Ogg Vorbis Read more…
MPEG LA is blatantly trying to claim a monopoly on online video. The patent system is failing for software, and initiatives to “fix” the system are not working. A clear exclusion of software ideas from patentability is the only workable solution.
VP8 is an attempt to free the software industry and all software developers from this patent troll. MPEG LA did not develop VP8 but it wants to own it nonetheless.
Canada’s Federal Court (FCAFC) has ruled that Amazon’s 1-click shopping patent describes patentable subject matter. Amazon’s patent was rejected last year by the Canadian Patent Appeal Board on grounds that business methods are not patentable subject matter, but that rejection has been thrown out by the Federal Court. Analysis of Read more…
CSIRO is an organisation that holds a patent on wifi. They’ve already sued twenty companies and have said that they want royalties from “the entire industry”. If this includes software developers, then we have a problem. Can anyone help analyse if their patent is a software patent or a hardware patent? Thanks in advance.
When you buy a digital camera, can holders of video patents claim ownership of your videos? They certainly claim to. When looking into this, I found an interesting 2008 opinion from the US Supreme Court that suggests, to me (IANAPL), that "exhaustion" through "first sale" might save our bacon: Quanta v. LGE.
Yesterday, (edit: thus, 2009-02-26) Microsoft attacked free software and GNU/Linux users with software patent claims against the Tom Tom Navigator and its implementation of the FAT file system. But do they have a sword or a wet rag? There have been interesting patent rejections coming from the USPTO’s Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) since the Bilski ruling was handed down by an en banc hearing of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC). One is the rejection of one of IBM’s database query patents. It was rejected because the innovation isn’t “tied to a particular machine”. So it’s a happy coincidence that MS claims their technology is running on all sorts of devices. Foot, meet mouth.
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