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There has been so much talk in the last two weeks that Microsoft has changed with regard to its patent policy toward Free Software. We fool ourselves if we trust any of the window-dressing that Microsoft has put forward to convince us that we can trust them in this regard.
Ubuntu has introduced a new Patent Policy to help developers and rights holders deal with software patent issues. With the Private Support, Canonical hopes to improve its revenue.
Patent lawyers and software giants whom they are representing (also lawyers that become patent trolls) jeopardise emerging companies, almost all of which do not want software to be patentable
On June 15, the New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, in cooperation with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), launched the Peer-to-Patent community patent review pilot program.
Dave Garrod, a lawyer who leads patent reform group PubPat's initiative against false marking, is now playing the part of the patent troll. He filed a patent infringement lawsuit against a number of tech companies, including a small Texas software company that went out of business years ago.
You may have read in News Picks recently that Sun won a partial stay in the NetApp patent lawsuit over ZFS, according to IP Law 360:A judge has partly stayed software company Network Appliance Inc.'s patent lawsuit against rival Sun Microsystems Inc. over Sun's ZFS technology, pending the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's re-examination of one of the patents in the suit.
"End Software Patents, a project working toward the elimination of software patents, was launched today. The ESP project will initially focus on two approaches: 1) assisting corporations that choose to challenge software patents in the courts and at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on the basis that patents for software and designs with no physically innovative step have no legal validity, and 2) public education aimed at passing laws to protect software from patent law. [...] In a separate announcement today, ESP released its first report on the current state of software and business method patents. The report covers the economic impact of software patents, including the $11.4 billion that U.S. businesses waste each year on software patent litigation.
Q. When is a program not a program? A. When it is all the works ever licensed under GPLv3. Via the Software Freedom Law Center comes news that the Free Software Foundation has published a document clarifying its position on patent litigation related to the GPLv3 - specifically what constitutes a program under the GPLv3 for the purposes of patent infringement claims.