Indian Patent Office Says No to Software Patents

The 2015 guidelines could have resulted in making it difficult for software developers to innovate with expansion of scope of patentability in the field of software. Prasanth Sugathan, counsel at SFLC.in, who represented the organisation at the consultations said: “The legislature by limiting the scope of patentable subject matter in the field of software wanted our software professionals and industry to innovate and not be stifled by companies holding a stockpile of patents. We are grateful to the Government and the patent office for listening to our feedback and suggestions and preserving the freedom of our coders and entrepreneurs to innovate without shackles.”

Source: Press Release: Indian Patent Office Says No to Software Patents

Patent Law Shouldn’t Block the Sale of Used Tech Products

This case raises important questions about the reach of American patent law and how much control a manufacturer can exert after its products have been lawfully sold. Taken to their logical conclusion, Lexmark’s arguments would mean that producers could use patent law to dictate how things like computers, printers and other patented goods are used, changed or resold and place restrictions on international trade.

Source: Patent Law Shouldn’t Block the Sale of Used Tech Products

To encourage innovation, the government gives inventors patents on their creations for a limited time. But patents should not give the manufacturer indefinite control over the product after it has been sold.

Time to fix patents

Patents also last too long. Protection for 20 years might make sense in the pharmaceutical industry, because to test a drug and bring it to market can take more than a decade. But in industries like information technology, the time from brain wave to production line, or line of code, is much shorter. When patents lag behind the pace of innovation, firms end up with monopolies on the building-blocks of an industry.

Source: Time to fix patents | The Economist

How the battle over biologics helped stall the Trans Pacific Partnership

Section 25a of Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Act provides for five years of data exclusivity for all medicines. It makes no distinction between biologics and other drugs. Data exclusivity provides an absolute monopoly that, unlike a patent, can’t be revoked or challenged in court.

The powerful biopharmaceutical industry lobby in the United States has been seeking 12 years of market exclusivity for biologics.

Source: How the battle over biologics helped stall the Trans Pacific Partnership

It seems clear to everyone except US negotiators – and biopharmaceutical industry lobbyists – that the demand for extending data exclusivity for biologics needs to be dropped if the TPP is to be finalised.

Imports of Digital Goods Face Test

In a proceeding closely watched by tech companies and the movie, music and publishing industries, the commission expanded its approach last year while reviewing a trade dispute over orthodontic devices. The ITC decided it could take action against virtual material coming into the U.S. and ordered a Texas-based company, ClearCorrect, to stop receiving digital models and data from Pakistan for the manufacture of teeth aligners, invisible mouthpieces used as an alternative to braces.

Source: Imports of Digital Goods Face Test – WSJ

The ITC in court papers said ClearCorrect hoped to skirt U.S. patent law by farming out part of its process to Pakistan. The commission argues it would be unreasonable to say it could block physical dental molds at the border yet do nothing to stop digital ones.

IBM Locks Up Cloud Processes With Patents

Exactly how deep is the Patent Office’s cloud expertise, anyway?

Is it as deep as its touch screen expertise, which led to its award of all those patents to Apple on the iPhone, even though prior art seemed to indicate Apple didn’t invent very many of the touch screen’s features? I hope the Patent Office will do better by the cloud in terms of keeping it out of one vendor’s hands.

Source: IBM Locks Up Cloud Processes With Patents – InformationWeek

Confidential USTR Emails Show Close Industry Involvement In TPP Negotiations

In another email in 2011, McCoy told GE lobbyists, “In case your CEO will be at the patent reform bill signing, I wanted to let you know that NZ Trade Minister Tim Groser is planning to attend. It would be a lovely opportunity for a CEO to turn to him and, for example, encourage NZ to support a strong IP chapter in the TPP…”

At another point, Jim DeLisi of Fanwood Chemical said he had just seen the text on rules of origin, and remarked, “Someone owes USTR a royalty payment. These are our rules. … This is a very pleasant surprise.”

Source: Confidential USTR Emails Show Close Industry Involvement In TPP Negotiations

New Theory Leads to Gigahertz Antenna on a Chip

You can see such symmetry breaking in a once-common 20th century technology: the two-wire ribbons used during television’s first few decades to send RF signals from rooftop VHF antennas to television sets without any loss. The electric RF current in the two conductors flow in opposite directions and have opposite phase. Because of the translational symmetry (the two conductors are parallel) the radiation fields cancel each other out, so there is no net radiation into space. But if you would flare the ends of the two conductors at one end of the ribbon, they aren’t parallel anymore and you break the translational symmetry. The two electric fields are no longer aligned and don’t cancel each other out, causing the RF signal to be converted into electromagnetic radiation.

via New Theory Leads to Gigahertz Antenna on a Chip – IEEE Spectrum.

Analysis of Erasure Code Patents for everyone

The most prominent prior art invalidating this patent is the RAID6 (one of the most commonly used Erasure Code) implementation of the linux kernel. In an article dated 2004 (i.e. ten years before the patent was granted to StreamScale) it is described to be optimized as follows : For additional speed improvements, it is desirable to use any integer vector instruction set that happens to be available on the machine, such as MMX or SSE-2 on x86, AltiVec on PowerPC, etc. Where SSE2 is the acronym of Streaming SIMD Extensions 2. The patent cites Anvin aticle’s but only to state the problem and does not acknowledge it also contains the solution.

via Erasure Code Patents | Analysis of Erasure Code Patents for everyone.

The True Story of How the Patent Bar Captured a Court and Shrank the Intellectual Commons

In defining the limits of patent rights, our political institutions have gotten an analogous question badly wrong. A single, politically captured circuit court with exclusive jurisdiction over patent appeals has consistently expanded the scope of patentable subject matter. This expansion has resulted in an explosion of both patents and patent litigation, with destructive consequences.

via The True Story of How the Patent Bar Captured a Court and Shrank the Intellectual Commons | Cato Unbound.