China became the world's top patent filer in 2011, issuing 58% of global intellectual property filings. [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges on Dec 23, 2011 - 49 comments

Francis Gurry, the Director of the UN's WIPO, claims the web would have been better if Tim Berners-Lee had patented HTML and licensed it. He does so on camera and in front of shocked members of the Internet Society and CERN. Ironically, exactly this thought experiment came up for the web's 20th birthday on this August 6th.

For a more rigorous perspective, three Boston University School of Law faculty have shown that lawsuits by non-practicing entities, aka patent trolls, have cost technology companies half a trillion dollars of lost wealth over the past two decades, with little benefit to small inventors, instead reducing the incentive to innovate. [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges on Oct 9, 2011 - 80 comments

The once-secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) slouches toward signing on Saturday. ACTA is expected to raise constitutional issues in the U.S., raise soverenty issues in the E.U., give copyright holders extensive powers to impose DRM and identify alleged infringers, and increase health risks worldwide. In addition, the U.S. has launched the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) to obtain what copyright provisions were stripped from ACTA. (see michaelgeist.ca, techdirt, or slashdot) [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges on Sep 28, 2011 - 44 comments

Europe's 'unitary patent' could impose software patents warns RMS. German courts have recently moved towards software patents upholding a patent on the automatic generation of structured documents in a client-server setting, i.e. XML, HTML, etc. (recently : the U.S. patent war)
posted by jeffburdges on Aug 22, 2011 - 31 comments

Is patent reform even possible? [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges on Aug 4, 2011 - 106 comments

“I actually ran it by a number of colleagues who teach administrative law and constitutional law,” Professor Duffy said, recalling his own surprise at finding such a fundamental and important flaw. He thought he must have been missing something. Law prof notices that every US patent approved since 2000 was approved unconstitutionally and thus are all probably invalid. Looks like he may be right. [more inside]
posted by Toekneesan on May 7, 2008 - 49 comments

Farmer Homer McFarland is being sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Monsanto corporation. His crime? Replanting his crops' own seed, as farmers have done for millennia, which violates the biotech giant's intellectual property rights, the company claims. Quietly, Monsanto's aggressive "seed police" have been suing farmers in 25 states for years, often settling out of court for huge sums, according to the Center for Food Safety's new report, Monsanto vs. US farmers [PDF link]. For more information, also see a new documentary called The Future of Food.
posted by digaman on Jan 15, 2005 - 55 comments

Eolas® Technologies Inc. owns the plugin concept. Meet US Patent 5,838,906: "The patent claims to cover mechanisms for embedding objects within distributed hypermedia documents, where at least some of the object's data is located external to the document, and there is a control path to the object's implementation to support user interaction with the object." Eolas sued Microsoft, was awarded $521 million, Microsoft is appealing, and the W3C held (Macromedia hosted) an ad hoc meeting on the recent court decision and launched a discussion list. Microsoft plans to promptly make changes to Internet Explorer. If this follows through, what are the negative and positive implications?
posted by aaronshaf on Sep 2, 2003 - 29 comments

Left Gets Nod from Right on Copyright Law - A darling of the conservative movement, federal Judge Richard Posner criticizes the Sonny Bono Act and attacks the Patent and Trademark Office for granting "very questionable" business method patents at a lecture organized by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution. (via How Appealing)
posted by ajr on Nov 21, 2002 - 11 comments