Software Free

A couple of days ago we included a link to this exploration of Douglas Goodyear and that connection to Microsoft. We have also been exploring Microsoft’s use of the United States government to push software patents into the European Union.

European Commissioner McCreevy is pushing for a bilateral patent treaty with the United States. This Tuesday 13 May in Brussels, White House and European representatives will try to adopt a tight roadmap for the signature of a EU-US patent treaty by the end of the year. Parts of the proposed treaty will contain provision on software patents, and could legalise them on both sides of the Atlantic.

Brussels, 13 May 2008 — European Commissioner McCreevy is pushing for a bilateral patent treaty with the United States. This Tuesday 13 May in Brussels, White House and European representatives will try to adopt a tight roadmap for the signature of a EU-US patent treaty by the end of the year. Parts of the proposed treaty will contain provision on software patents, and could legalise them on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Talks in the Transatlantic Economic Council (TEC) are the current push for software patents. The US want to eliminate the higher standards of the European Patent Convention. The bilateral agenda is dictated by multinationals gathered in the Transatlantic Economic Business Dialogue (TABD). When you have a look who is in the Executive Board of the TABD, you find not a single European SME in there", says Benjamin Henrion, a Brussels based patent policy specialist.

CNN reports that Pr John Duffy, speaker at Eupaco2, defends the patentability of business method patents in front of the CAFC:

Washington attorney John Duffy appeared for Regulatory Datacorp, a consortium of financial-services companies that uses patented business data processes to monitor financial crime and terrorism funding. Duffy told the panel he believes the U.S. Congress wants companies to have broad access to business-process patents. "The intent of Congress is to be broad," Duffy said.

IP Watch has the story:

Shortly after a new government was installed in Bangkok earlier this year, European Union trade commissioner Peter Mandelson urged it to review a series of compulsory licenses issued by the previous administration that overruled patents on several medicines. [compulsory licensing == right to license an invention, the patent is not "overruled" as IP Watch claims]

But the European does not back the aggressive push of the European Trade Commissioner.

[MEP] Agnoletto alleged that there is a contradiction between statements that Mandelson has made to the [European] Parliament and those contained in his letter. “He is using two different languages,” Agnoletto added. “I have the impression he is working more for the pharmaceutical industry than for the Commission.”

From the NGO side Médecins Sans Frontières is beating the drum.

The intellectual insanity resumes. Let’s take a quick look at some highlights from the news.

Law Professor John F. Duffy discovered that thousands of patents in the US might be unconstitutional. The government has no comments at this moment.

On Linux Journal.

Yesterday as well as the day before that, some of the press reopened a jar of worms and spoke about Microsoft’s software patents minefield, but bloggers did not pay any attention to Novell’s fight against the free in “Free software”. Novell is just about as guilty as Microsoft because without its participation and pasive endorsement Microsoft’s efforts would hold no water.

read more

"End Software Patents (ESP) has filed an amicus curiae brief in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's (CAFC) rehearing of the In re Bilski case. The rehearing could lead to the elimination of patents on software.

read more

On Open Enterprise blog.

On Open Enterprise blog.

On Open Enterprise blog.

On Open Enterprise blog.

One word that has cropped up time and again on this blog is "modularity". It's one of the prime characteristics of the open source way - and one of its greatest strengths. Now wonder, then, that Microsoft has finalled cottoned on - helped, no doubt, by the abject failure of its Vista monster:

When Windows 7 launches sometime after the start of 2010, the desktop OS will be Microsoft's most "modular" yet. Having never really been comfortable with the idea of a single, monolithic desktop OS offering, Microsoft has offered multiple desktop OSes in the marketplace ever since the days of Windows NT 3.1, with completely different code bases until they were unified in Windows 2000. Unification isn't necessarily a good thing, however; Windows Vista is a sprawling, complex OS.

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Source: open...