A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work by [MeFi's own] waxpancake, aka Andy Baio.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken on Mar 13, 2012 - 97 comments

More good mp3 news. Thomson Multimedia is now requiring patent payments for MP3 decoders as well as encoders.
posted by alan on Aug 27, 2002 - 23 comments

The W3C's RAND Patent Policy commenting deadline has been extended. At first glance, the new policies seem to encourage software patents, but after reading the whole thing and the W3C's response to current comments, it looks, to my admittedly naive eyes, as though the W3C is trying to make it so that companies using proprietary software are going to have to make it available to other people for licensing. Why is this new structure potentially a bad thing?
posted by cCranium on Oct 2, 2001 - 8 comments

FLASH! Sanity breaks out in Congress! Doesn't sound like grandstanding to me; sounds like these guys have a clue on software and business method patents. "Healthy skepticism" sound like real friendly words to me.
posted by baylink on Oct 4, 2000 - 0 comments

Amazon is approved for a patent on the technology behind their affiliate program. Wow, this really has the potential to shake things up a bit. Will software patents like this destroy internet commerce?
posted by webshaping on Feb 27, 2000 - 3 comments

Web-related software patents are starting to look like the new cyber-squatting equivalent. People are patenting all sorts of mundane things like "electronic shopping carts" and "making secure purchases via the internet." My guess is in 3 or 4 years, after many of these silly patents have been awarded, we'll see a restructuring of the US patent system.
posted by mathowie on Feb 22, 2000 - 2 comments