Momentum seems to be building in Congress to tackle patent reform. From an open source perspective, any reform that reduces the risk and expense of patent lawsuits is surely a…
This morning the New York Times published a front-page story on software patents. My wife got to the paper before I did, and as I got coffee she told me the story would make…
While almost no one thinks that the America Invents Act (AIA) will completely solve America’s patent problems, there are a few provisions in the AIA that may be useful tools…
If you guessed that they are all big in California—well, you're kinda right. But the more significant answer is that they are part of a growing broad array of the US economy…
Last week, to the surprise of patent lawyers and the biotechnology industry, advocates for technological freedom won an enormous victory against socially harmful distortions…
One of the most important aspects of the recent trial victory for Red Hat and Novell was a finding that the asserted patent claims were invalid. This meant that the jury was…
The Supreme Court case of Bilski v Kappos was billed as a case over business methods, but at its core it was over an application for a patent on software, and the denial of…
For all the debate and litigation around software patents, I thought that there was at least one point on which all sides could agree: the objective of the U.S. patent system…
Yesterday a patent reform bill passed in the Senate, but the sound and fury don't seem to signify much. The legislation as it evolved has shed most of the features that could…
The threat from software patent trolls arises not from an invisible distant origin, but actually from within open source communities. So that's the best place to eradicate it…
In my March 2 post on patent reform , I noted that many of the provisions offered in prior versions of patent reform bills were removed from the pending bill. On March 8, the…
The software patent debate sometimes seems awfully one-sided. Passionate opponents carefully explain that software patents hinder innovation and supporters of the status quo…