Patent trolls are a blight on the tech industry, extolling licence fees for “inventions” that they never implemented, sitting on broad claims waiting until enough people are deemed to be using the technology and then suing them. These are not innovators, they are often just shells made up of an Read more…
The continuing existence of patent troll is a baffling failure of modern regulation. For those not familiar with this mythical figure, it is the bane of the software industry in the United States. If you are new to the term, I highly recommend listening to this amazing podcast from NPR Read more…
I finally managed to read the latest (and hopefully last) instalment of the long legal saga that is SAS Institute v World Programming Ltd. This has been an interesting yet long case that made it all the way to the European Court of Justice, and it deals with several questions Read more…
Judith Rauhofer has sent me this gem of a patent. I present you U.S. patent 6,935,954 which protects a “Sanity system for video game”. The abstract reads: “A video game and game system incorporating a game character’s sanity level that is affected by occurrences in the game such as encountering Read more…
Habitual readers may have noticed that I am not a fan of software patents. From time to time one reads attempts to defend them in comments, blog posts, and with less frequency in scholarly articles, but as time goes by more evidence comes to light to demonstrate that they Read more…
For something which has the unequivocal weight of the law behind it, software copyright has had a rather bumpy history in the courts. Once we get past the obvious facts of law, namely that copyright protects source code, the application of such protection has been more difficult. The reason for Read more…
By now there is growing evidence that software patents do not benefit anyone. Really, software developers, software experts, venture capitalists, and industry insiders, everyone who is actually involved in producing software knows that software patents are a blight to the industry. The only ones who seem to benefit are patent Read more…
Long-time readers may remember the interesting case of SAS Institute v World Programming (my analysis here), an important software interoperability decision in the UK that got referred to the European Court of Justice. The case sets SAS, one of the biggest business software giants, against a UK software company that Read more…
This is an excellent podcast from NPR about software patents Some truly eye-opening interviews and in-depth investigation looking at patent trolls, the reason East Texas District is the epicentre for patent litigation, and the effect of software patents on innovation. While it is obviously American-centric, anyone involved in software has Read more…
BitTorrent Inc has been sued for patent infringement by a company named Tranz-Send Broadcasting Network. I usually suspect the presence of a patent troll when it seems impossible to find the website of the claimant in the patent dispute, and when most of the Google results for the company include Read more…