Microsoft's Patent Attorney Jim Markwith told the Open Source Business Conference that the reason they hadn't named the supposedly infringing patents was that it would be 'administratively impossible to keep up' with the list.
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Nigerian Patent Suit Still Dogs OLPC
http://ap.google.com –
A potential $20 million problem for the group behind the "$100 laptop" isn't going away easily. Ade Oyegbola, an inventor who claims the One Laptop Per Child nonprofit stole his designs for a Nigerian keyboard, recently won a round in a Lagos court. Now this week, Oyegbola kept the U.S. side of his legal fight alive by pressing his case in federal court.
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Battle on Microsoft standard push
http://www.australianit.news.com.au –
A GLOBAL war has broken out over Microsoft's bid to make the XML document format used in Office 2007 an international standard.
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Wed Nov 14th: NYLUG Presents James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center
http://www.michaeldolan.com –
"Please join us on Wednesday evening, for a presentation by James Vasile of the Free Software Law Center on several legal topics of interest to users of Free and Open Source Software.
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Eben Moglen on WAMU 88.5 FM American University Radio
http://www.wamu.org –
Open source software is built on the idea of cooperation: it's distributed for free, with code made available for everyone to improve. But there's debate about the future of this collaborative enterprise, with some players making deals with IT giants like Microsoft. We look at an industry at a crossroads and the evolving relationship between transparency and profit in software.
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The Confessions of a Microsoft Lobbyist in ECMA
http://boycottnovell.com –
As obligatory background about Jan van den Beld consider the following:
Read more »OSL 3.0: A Better License for Open Source Software
http://rosenlaw.com –
There are many ways to license open source software. Given the attention paid recently to the General Public License (GPL) and its latest version (GPLv3), you may be interested to know that there are other licenses that satisfy the principles of free and open source software without the confusion and polemics that surround the GPL.
Read more »Reversing Loss, Microsoft Wins Open-Format Designation
http://www.nytimes.com –
Microsoft has won an international standards designation for its open-document format, according to voting results obtained Tuesday, apparently ending a divisive yearlong battle with software rivals before a global standards-setting organization.
Read more »Should Yahoo! be able to patent "smart drag and drop"? How you can help the US Patent Office reject a bogus patent claim
http://lawgeek.typepad.com –
The Peer-To-Patent Project is a new initiative by New York Law School's Do Tank in cooperation with the U.S. Patent Office to use open source and open knowledge techniques to help stop the deluge of bad software patents in America.
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ISO: The New USPTO (and It’s Not a Compliment)
http://boycottnovell.com –
ISO has become a laughing stock in the IT circles, says a seniors who (spear)headed OOXML. That won't matter much for PDF.
Read more »The New Perverted Reverse Value Theory of Copyright
http://williampatry.blogspot.com –
Candidates for a unified theory justifying copyright in all its manifestations include the value of the copyright owner’s efforts in creating the work. This value can take a natural rights form – the value of genius – but it can also take the more mundane Lockean agricultural form – copyright owners are the sowers of their intellectual labor.
Read more »Tim Bray Calls the ISO Process “Brutal and Corrupt”
http://boycottnovell.com –
Tim Bray was clearly dissatisfied the last time his words were carefully selected and then used to describe the terrible state of the OOXML BRM in Geneva [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. To be more specific, it was the “cherry-picking” as he later called it that had him disappointed by articles quoting him.
Read more »Subcontractors, Meet Open Source
http://www.informationweek.com –
Now that the recent lawsuit against Verizon (NYSE: VZ) by a couple of open source developers has been settled, it's become clear -- as some people suspected -- that the real offender here wasn't Verizon per se but a subcontractor, Actiontec.
Read more »Contra Durusau, Part 1
http://www.robweir.com –
From the start Patrick has remained publicly silent on the topic of OOXML. No blog posts, no press, nothing. If you asked, he would say that this was his policy. Privately, you would get an earful (all negative), but as befits the unbiased chair of the committee which is responsible for the technical recommendation for the US NB, he kept his personal opinions out of the public arena.
Read more »Peer to Patent Project Extended and Expanded - Mark Webbink Exec. Dir. of New Center
http://www.groklaw.net –
I'm very happy to tell you that it's just been announced that the Peer-to-Patent project, which is a cooperative project between New York Law School and the USPTO, has been extended after the first year's trial. It's also been expanded to include business methods patents! Yum. I can't wait to see you try to invalidate some of those.
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