The draft of the version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL) has finally been released, and what a document it is! In general, the wording is clearer, tidier and tighter than version 2. The preamble is still as ideological as always (an in my opinion a tad superfluous). Read more…
Court of Appeals judge Sir Robin Jacob has made a vocal attack against the American practice of patenting everything under the sun, and has stated that there is no evidence that software patents encourage innovation. “The United States takes the view that anything made by man, under the sun, can Read more…
Here is a pledge at PledgeBank that proposes that “I will pledge to never purchase a CD containing any form of Digital Rights Management (DRM), but only if 500 people around the world will too.” I have signed this as I generally dislike the practice of a company telling me Read more…
There is a very good article in The Guardian about the new format battle between high definition DVD replacements, Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Sony is banking on Blu-ray by including it in the Playstation 3, which will mean that they will have some captive audience and a large boost from the Read more…
The EPO has just released a study conducted in 2004 by consulting firm Roland Berger Market Research on the cost of patenting in Europe. According to the study, an average EPO patent costs €30,530 EUR, where the costs are higher for Japanese and American companies validating in Europe. As further Read more…
IBM has joined other big players in the open source community and has expressed that it will use OSS in order to improve the quality of software patents in the United States. The idea is to have a searchable software code repository that will make it easier to detemine if Read more…
I am now back from the tropics. Thanks to Arne Kolbe, who kindly accepted to fill in with some posts while I was away sipping piña coladas and Imperial.
Are you feeling the Christmas blues? Are you sick of eating fruticake, turkey or tamal? Do you think that if you see another picture of Santa you will leave the room screaming? The solution is finally here! Let Slingshot Santa cure all of your problems.(Thanks to Rena for the link).
As usual, James Boyle has made an excellent comment in his always informative FT column, this time about the recently announced review of the database right. Could we be facing a turn in IP policy? As far as I know, there has never been a situation where an IP right Read more…
Greg Aharonian has named the worst software patent of the year in his PATNEWS mailing list, and I must say that I thoroughly agree with his choice. Behold U.S. Patent 6,910,071, which protects a “Surveillance monitoring and automated reporting method for detecting data changes”. Sounds impressive, right? Here is the Read more…