software patents - Page number 5

Last week, to the surprise of patent lawyers and the biotechnology industry, advocates for technological freedom won an enormous victory against socially harmful distortions of patent law.  The Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York held invalid patents owned by Myriad Genetics on diagnostic testing for genetic susceptibility to the most common hereditary forms of breast and ovarian cancer.  By "patenting" the right to determine whether the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are present in the relevant mutated form in a women's genome, Myriad Genetics has been able to exclude all other laboratories from conducting the test.  Patients and their insurers have paid much more, and women and their families have waited crucial weeks longer than necessary for information relevant to treatment and potentially affecting survival.   » Read more

At the Linux Foundation counsel meeting in Palo Alto last week, I had a chance to talk with attorneys for some leading tech companies about the threat to open source software from patent trolls. Some still politely avoid calling a troll a troll and substitute the more anodyne “non-practicing entity.” I find the uglier term more fitting, because it's an ugly business. » Read more

After a decade-long battle, terms of a settlement agreement were finally reached last week between the European Commission and Microsoft regarding anticompetitiveness. » Read more

As a child growing up in India, one of the first things I learned is a hymn to Saraswati, the Goddess of Knowledge, which says that:

Wonderful is your gift of knowledge
the more we share, the more it grows
the more we hoard it, the more it diminishes

As a grown-up living in a globalized world, I am constantly bombarded by the the term, “intellectual property.” » Read more

When the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the Bilski case a few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to be in attendance at their courtroom in Washington, D.C. I'd previously worked on a brief for Red Hat arguing that the Court should address the harm that software patents cause to innovation. Even so, I had my doubts as to whether the Court would fully appreciate the serious problem of software patents, and recognized that it might limit its attention to business method patents and try to avoid the software patents issue. » Read more

I spent two days this week at the Coach K Leadership Conference at Duke. It's always good to get above the trees for a few days, and this experience was exactly that kind of opportunity. Jonathan Opp did a nice summary post on the conference here and you can see the live Twitter stream here. » Read more