Twitter will not weaponize your work (without your permission). According to an agreement it now makes with its engineers and inventors, Twitter does not have the right to use the patents of its employees offensively without their consent, and this limitation will apply to future purchasers of the Twitter patent portfolio. The patent wars previously and previouslier on the blue.
posted by gauche on Apr 18, 2012 - 41 comments

The Great Tech War of 2012: Apple v. Google v. Amazon v. Facebook
posted by OmieWise on Oct 18, 2011 - 98 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

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