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Even today, sources on inventions list six by Franklin that are still in active use today. One of those sits in my back hall, cheerfully and economically heating the back of my home – the Franklin stove. Another sits on the bridge of my nose as I write this – a pair of bifocals. But this is about Franklin’s greatest invention, one that the lists never mention because it is mere words, not a physical object. Franklin made seven trips to Europe, as a diplomat and scholar. He was welcomed into all the learned societies that existed in Europe then....

[...] Inventors have always held a special place in American history and business lore, embodying innovation and economic progress in a country that has long prized individual creativity and the power of great ideas. In recent decades, tinkerers and researchers have given society microchips, personal computers, the Internet, balloon catheters, bar codes, fiber optics, e-mail systems, hearing aids, air bags and automated teller machines, among a bevy of other devices. [...] A larger pool of Mr. West's colleagues echoes his concerns. "The scientific and technical building blocks of our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many other nations...

When Sprint Nextel filed its lawsuit last month against theglobe.com, Voiceglo and Vonage Holdings for allegedly infringing on its proprietary technology, it may have catapulted all voice over IP (VoIP) service providers into the complicated world of patent litigation. Whether the two defendants eventually have their day in court or settle matters privately still remains to be seen. As of this article's publication date, no response has yet been filed by either defendant. But legal experts familiar with the case generally agree that Sprint is executing on a well-constructed legal strategy that the puts the defendants before an uphill climb....

WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- The U.S. patent office has reportedly granted a patent for an anti-gravity device -- breaking its rule to reject inventions that defy the laws of physics. The journal Nature said patent 6,960,975 was granted Nov. 1 to Boris Volfson of Huntington, Ind., for a space vehicle propelled by a superconducting shield that alters the curvature of space-time outside the craft in a way that counteracts gravity. One of the main theoretical arguments against anti-gravity is that it implies the availability of unlimited energy. "If you design an anti-gravity machine, you've got a perpetual-motion machine," Robert...

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will publish history’s first “storyline patent” application today from an application filed in November, 2003. Inventor Andrew Knight will assert publication-based provisional patent rights against the entertainment industry. Falls Church, Virginia (PRWEB) November 3, 2005 -- Further to a policy of publishing patent applications eighteen months after filing, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is scheduled to publish history’s first “storyline patent” application today. The publication will be based on a utility patent application filed by Andrew Knight in November, 2003, the first such application to claim a fictional storyline. Knight, a rocket engine...

It reads like an Onion parody, but it is real. Here's the USPTO published application: Process of relaying a story having a unique plot Abstract A process of relaying a story having a timeline and a unique plot involving characters comprises: indicating a character's desire at a first time in the timeline for at least one of the following: a) to remain asleep or unconscious until a particular event occurs; and b) to forget or be substantially unable to recall substantially all events during the time period from the first time until a particular event occurs; indicating the character's substantial...

Taiwan has responded to bird flu fears by starting work on its own version of the anti-viral drug, Tamiflu, without waiting for the manufacturer's consent. Taiwan officials said they had applied for the right to copy the drug - but the priority was to protect the public. Tamiflu, made by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, cannot cure bird-flu but is widely seen as the best anti-viral drug to fight it, correspondents say. Bird flu has killed at least 60 people in Asia since December 2003. Scientists fear the lethal H5N1 strain of the virus could combine with human flu or mutate...

One-Fifth of Human Genes Have Been Patented, Study Reveals Stefan Lovgren for National Geographic News October 13, 2005 A new study shows that 20 percent of human genes have been patented in the United States, primarily by private firms and universities. The study, which is reported this week in the journal Science, is the first time that a detailed map has been created to match patents to specific physical locations on the human genome. Researchers can patent genes because they are potentially valuable research tools, useful in diagnostic tests or to discover and produce new drugs. "It might come as...

Hollywood and large U.S. software companies chalked up another crucial yet little-noticed victory last week with the final approval of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. You wouldn't know it from a political debate veering between labor standards in Nicaragua and the evils of protectionism, but one major section of CAFTA will export some of the more controversial sections of U.S. copyright law. Once it takes effect, CAFTA will require Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua to mirror the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's broad prohibition on bypassing copy-protection technology.

   http://www.news.com/ Why Bill Gates wants 3,000 new patents By Randall Stross http://news.com.com/Why+Bill+Gates+wants+3%2C000+new+patents/2100-1008_3-5812318.html Story last modified Sun Jul 31 08:15:00 PDT 2005 <div><img><br><a><img></a></div> "EXCITING," "uninteresting" and "not exciting" don't seem like technical terms, but they show up a lot in United States patent application No. 20,050,160,457, titled "Annotating Programs for Automatic Summary Generation." It seems to be about baseball. The inventors have apparently come up with software that can detect the portions of a baseball broadcast that contain what they call "excited speech," as well as hits (what I call "excited ball") and automatically compile those portions into a...

In the mid 1990s, when I first began running into open source in my practice, I noticed that open source had a very strange effect on intellectual property lawyers. It was a Chicken Little situation, but instead of crying "the sky is falling" they were crying "the code is infringing." Nearly ten years later, very few intellectual property lawsuits have actually been filed relating to open source. Roughly, the scorecard looks like this: Trademark infringement suits: 1 (MySQL-NuSphere)Copyright infringement suits: 1/2 (SCO, after modifying the complaint)Trade secret infringement suits: 1/2 (SCO, original complaint)Patent infringement suits: 0 The sky did not...

May 2, 2005 Secretive Buyer of Some E-Commerce Patents Turns Out to Be Novell By JOHN MARKOFF AN FRANCISCO, May 1 - A Silicon Valley mystery has been solved.The mystery involves a set of electronic commerce patents purchased, after heated bidding, in a dot-com bankruptcy auction by a Texas lawyer last December. They were acquired, it turns out, on behalf of the Novell Corporation, the giant software and computer services company, a company official acknowledged on Friday.Many executives in the computer industry and at Internet software and services firms had expressed concern that the patents could be used to...

India: India’s Patents Bill, 2005 - Is It TRIPS Compliant? 31 March 2005 Article by Manoj Pillai Free Weekly Newsletters Would you like to be kept informed about similar articles? >Signup< Content Awards Most Popular Article in India for March 2005 Contributor Most Read In India for March 2005 Further information Give Author Feedback Sign up for a free News Alert Information contributed by LEX ORBIS View all Articles by this Firm View summary of all information contributed General links Email a colleague with a synopsis and link to this article Printer-friendly version of this page Become a contributor View...

BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhuanet) -- An academic appraisal report released here Wednesday said Chinese scientists lag behind their counterparts in developed countries with regard to the innovativeness of their research papers, which leads to a low frequency of citation. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) sponsored the appraisal of world science development trends and China's influence in science. Xiao Xiantao, a senior researcher who oversees the project, said in an interview with Xinhua that Chinese scientists performed well in mathematics, material science, chemistry and engineering, while having little influence in agricultural science and life science. According to the Essential Sciences...

Indian and international aid groups on Monday slammed a proposed overhaul of the country's patent laws, saying it would end production of cheap generic drugs and threaten the survival of cancer and AIDS patients in the developing world. India's government on Friday introduced legislation that would tighten patent laws to bring them in line with World Trade Organization rules. The bill will be debated in Parliament in the coming weeks to meet a WTO deadline of early 2005 for the changes. (snip) Critics say the proposed law will boost drug prices, and that foreign companies will take over the pharmaceutical...

STRASBOURG, France (Reuters) - The European Commission will not propose a new law on the patenting of computer-related inventions if the European Parliament rejects the current controversial proposal, a top official said on Tuesday. "If the parliament decides to reject it, then the Commission will respect your wishes. I will not propose a new directive," EU Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy told lawmakers. "You can of course reject or substantially amend the proposal," he said. European Union ministers endorsed the disputed proposal on Monday, which critics say could stifle software development. That decision is seen as a boost for advocates...

Brussels, 28 February 2005 -- The Commission has turned down the European Parliament's request for a restart of the software patents directive. Despite a virtually unanimous vote in the European Parliament's responsible JURI Committee and a unanimous request by the whole European Parliament in plenary, the Commission's DG Internal Market is apparently determined to destroy the directive by trying to get the EP to massively reject the directive in second reading. The Commission's Directorate General for the Internal Market, which is responsible for the directive, has informed several parties today it has denied the EP's request for a restart of...

Sun Microsystems (Profile, Products, Articles) on Tuesday launched its OpenSolaris program, which provides access to the Solaris operating system via an open source format, and also announced the release of 1,670 patents to the open source community. The initial piece of Solaris being made available now is DTrace performance analysis technology. Other Solaris source code, such as file system and security technologies, will be offered in the second quarter of this year. Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy, a surprise participant on Tuesday’s conference call pertaining to the announcements, declared Sun as likely the largest donor of code anywhere on...

.B.M. plans to announce today that it is making 500 of its software patents freely available to anyone working on open-source projects, like the popular Linux operating system, on which programmers collaborate and share code.The new model for I.B.M., analysts say, represents a shift away from the traditional corporate approach to protecting ownership of ideas through patents, copyrights, trademark and trade-secret laws. The conventional practice is to amass as many patents as possible and then charge anyone who wants access to them. I.B.M. has long been the champion of that formula. The company, analysts estimate, collected $1 billion or more...

Carrying over from last year, I predict that Burst.com will beat Microsoft in their current lawsuit. But to avoid having to eat crow again over timing, let me put this in greater context. IF a trial actually takes place, as it is now scheduled to do this summer, Burst will easily win. Microsoft is at a disadvantage already as a bully. Burst will probably get Judge Motz to tell the jury that Microsoft deliberately destroyed evidence, and it doesn't hurt, either, that Burst is just plain right on all counts -- Microsoft DID violate their patents, DID violate Burst's non-disclosure...

Americans have had no lack of dramatic news this year. The Boston Red Sox finally broke the 86-year-old "curse of the Babe" and won a World Series.... But events that don't make headline news often are more important than those that do. That quiet backdrop is explored by Sir Harold Evans, a British journalist, in "They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine -- Two Centuries of Innovation," (Little Brown & Co.) In an interview in the winter issue of "Invention & Technology" magazine, he is quoted as saying that America became economically strong through the "adaptive...

An obscure auction scheduled for this morning in San Francisco's financial district threatens to make life mighty uncomfortable for many companies that conduct business with one another over the Internet. The auction stems from the bankruptcy of Commerce One, a San Francisco maker of software for online business transactions.

When Former Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) administrator L. Paul Bremer III left Baghdad after the highly publicized “transfer of sovereignty” in June 2004, he left his imprint through 100 orders that he enacted as chief of the occupation authority in Iraq. Among them is Order 81 regarding “Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety.” ********** The new law is presented as being necessary to ensure the supply of good quality seeds in Iraq and to facilitate Iraq’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO).5 What it will actually do is facilitate the penetration of Iraqi agriculture by...

BRASILIA, Brazil, Nov. 30 (UPI) -- Brazilian health officials said Tuesday they might break the patent on some AIDS drugs held by international drug companies. Pedro Checkr, chief of nation's AIDS program, told reporters Tuesday Brazil might break the patents some time next year. Brazil has threatened in the past to defy patents in order to provide citizens affordable drugs as part of a national program that provides free medicine to Brazilians infected with HIV and AIDS. However Checkr said the program is in jeopardy as the cost of providing the drugs places an increasing burden on the Brazilian budget....

THE CASE AGAINST CANADIAN DRUG RE-IMPORTATION by Timothy Rollins, Editor and Publisher October 21, 2004 The funny thing in all the hysteria of the campaign this year is that John Kerry, John Edwards and all their liberal idiot friends have been extolling the virtues of re-importing cheaper drugs from Canada (flag, right). Clearly, this is but another scare tactic designed to prey on perhaps one of America's most vulnerable elements of society - the elderly. People who prey on others are justifiably called predators. Yet "Botox Boy" - who wants be America's gigolo-in-chief - fails to realize this is a...

Tom Friedman was on Imus in the Morning. Unfortunately, I was on the phone during most of the legthy interview. However, Friedman said that Muslims nations have applied for 200 patents in the last twenty years while on American company, Hewlett-Packard has appplied for 11,000 patents. Therefore, it is the backword people against the rest of the world.

Software groups warn of FTA dangers By Online Staff August 6, 2004 The US-Australia Free Trade Agreement poses a grave threat to the entire Australian software development industry due to the legal framework on intellectual property which is required upon adoption of the pact, the Open Source Industry Association and Linux Australia have warned. In a statement issued in Melbourne today, both organisations said the FTA would hamper Australia's ability to efficiently compete in global markets. "Much like the introduction of a flawed patenting regime for pharmaceuticals, adoption of a flawed patent regime for software is not in Australia's interests,"...

Linux potentially infringes 283 patents, including 27 held by Microsoft but none that have been validated by court judgments, according to a group that sells insurance to protect those using or selling Linux against intellectual-property litigation. Dan Ravicher, founder and executive director of the Public Patent Foundation, conducted the analysis for Open Source Risk Management. OSRM is like an insurance company, selling legal protection against Linux copyright-infringement claims. It plans to expand the program to patent protections.

IZHEVSK, Russia, July 24 - The bazaar in this industrial city shows why Western companies regard Russia as a land of piracy. Bootlegged copies of new American movies - "King Arthur,'' "Troy'' and "Spider-Man 2'' - sell for $3. Photoshop CS, a $600 program in Western stores, fetches $2.75. Markets like this, found throughout Russia, have been a longstanding subject of diplomatic complaint. Washington contends Russian intellectual-property pirates cost the United States more than $1 billion a year. Now Russia is striking back. A Russian industry and product designer are asserting that the United States has been abetting intellectual-property pirates...

p align="left">Subdomain Patent Sparks Concerns By Dennis McCafferty March 26, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- In astonished postings to Web hosting discussion forums last week, several hosting providers announced that they had received letters from a party representing Stateline, Nevada-based Ideaflood Inc. (ideaflood.com). The letter stated that Ideaflood has patented the idea of assigning users subdomains, such as AutomotiveWidgets.hostingcompany.com. According to the discussion postings, the letter said that, since Ideaflood has patented the concept, further subdomain service for customers would require the purchase of a license through Ideaflood. "We have utilized this idea for years," wrote the letter...

NYTimes.com > Technology Dustin Satloff, a 10-year-old from Manhattan, with the baseball card collection that inspired him to invent a fantasy game. He recently received a patent for it. Not Too Young for a Patent By TERESA RIORDAN Published: February 16, 2004 LAST week, Dustin Satloff, a fifth grader at the Collegiate School in Manhattan, received his first patent at the age of 10. It was for a new way to play fantasy baseball with special trading cards. While it might seem unusual for a child to obtain a patent, it is not. About half of the 70 young people...

<p>Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches. Technically.</p>

Microsoft has applied for patents that could prevent competing applications from reading documents created with the latest version of the software giant's Office program. The company filed similar patent applications in New Zealand and the European Union that cover word processing documents stored in the XML (Extensible Markup Language) format. The proposed patent would cover methods for an application other than the original word processor to access data in the document. The U.S. Patent Office had no record of a similar application. Microsoft representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment. XML-based capabilities have been one of the main...

December 11, 2003: Search By Number Gary Price points out that in their quest to become the command line of the Internet, Google has added several new features: you can now enter UPS (1Z1234567891234567) and FedEx (fedex 999999999999), patent (patent 5123123), airplane (n199ua), and FCC equipment (fcc B4Z-34009-PIR) ID/tracking numbers. Fun stuff.

Eolas Technologies, which has the rights to a browser plug-in patent, has filed a motion to permanently stop Microsoft distributing Internet Explorer browsers that infringe the patent Eolas Technologies on Monday filed a motion to permanently enjoin Microsoft's distribution of its Internet Explorer browser amid a flurry of court filings by both sides in the pivotal patent infringement case. Eolas, the sole licensee and sublicensor of a browser plug-in patent owned by the University of California, asked the US District Court in Chicago for an injunction against distributing copies of IE capable of running plug-in applications in a way the...

AN FRANCISCO, Aug. 11 — A federal jury awarded a former University of California researcher $521 million today in a lawsuit against Microsoft that asserted its Explorer Web browser infringed a patent for sending software applications over the Internet. The lawsuit, which was filed in 1999 by Michael Doyle, now a Chicago businessman and founder of Eolas Technologies Inc., and the University of California, had sought $1.2 billion. The plaintiffs asserted that the invention had been crucial in permitting Microsoft to compete against the Netscape Navigator Web browser, now owned by AOL Time Warner Inc. A Microsoft spokesman, Jim Desler,...

Last month, when Microsoft announced its bellwether decision to award employees restricted stock instead of options, it also made news in a federal courtroom—the kind of news you keep quiet about. Microsoft suffered utter defeat at a crucial pretrial hearing in what appears to be the highest-stakes patent litigation ever—one in which a tiny company called InterTrust Technologies claims that 85% of Microsoft's entire product line infringes its digital security patents. (See Can This Man Bring Down Microsoft?) InterTrust's engineers developed and patented what they say are key inventions in two areas: so-called digital-rights management and trusted systems. The technologies...

With little fanfare, a federal judge has issued a critical ruling supporting a patent lawsuit against Microsoft brought by InterTrust, a digital rights management company. In a crucial preliminary hearing aimed essentially at setting the ground rules for the trial itself, Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong ruled strongly in favor of InterTrust Technologies. The company is suing Microsoft on 144 counts of patent infringement, contending that Microsoft products ranging from the Windows operating system to the Xbox game system violate its digital rights management patents. No decision has been made on whether Microsoft actually has infringed on InterTrust's patents. But the...

The owners of the MacCoffee brand have challenged the right of McDonald's Russia to the similar sounding McCafe logo as the former prepares to launch a chain of coffee shops in Moscow. Future Enterprises Singapore claims the fast food giant's trademark sounds confusingly similar to its instant coffee label and has appealed to Russia's trademarks and patents agency, Rospatent. According to Sudip Nair, the head of FES's Moscow office, the appeal points out that his company has held the right to the brand since 1998. FES has sold its instant coffee under the MacCoffee name since 1994. The company also...

Inventors patent ideas to pre-empt their rivals Companies then must buy rights to the devices ...If a company decides to build a product based on his idea, it might have to buy the patent from him, pay him a licensing fee or face him in court. It's part of a legal tactic called "offensive blocking patents" in which businesses or individual entrepreneurs use patents not so much as tools to build new products, but as legal roadblocks or bargaining chips against competitors or corporate giants. Some legal experts, including those representing big corporations, are skeptical of this approach, which...

The European Commission accused the French yesterday of a "lamentable" record in enforcing European Union law and pledged tough action to bring member states to book. Despite being zealous advocates of closer European integration, the French are facing 220 open cases involving systematic violations of EU laws and are guilty of the most flagrant foot-dragging of any EU state when implanting new rules. The long list of violations include a refusal to obey the law on biotech patents, for maintaining an illegal ban on food additives, and using obstructionist measures to prevent lawyers from other EU countries working in France....

GOTTA FREEP THIS - Operation Accountability Please help FReep the Commissioner for Patents and the US Patent and Trademark Office who have not used logic or accountability and have not followed the authority of the US Constitution. There are at least two very important reasons why this important. REASON 1. At the present time, with the United States at war against terror, energy measurement, energy generation, and energy storage -- including alternative methods -- are crucially important to the United States for both its economy and for its security. Meanwhile, the US Patent Office under the Commissioner for Patents Godici...

Remarks by Chairman Alan GreenspanMarket Economies and Rule of LawAt the 2003 Financial Markets Conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Sea Island, Georgia (via satellite) April 4, 2003 Market economies require a rule of law. A society without state protection of individual rights, especially the right to own property, would not build private long term assets, a key ingredient of a growing modern economy. Yet an excess of rules--in the extreme case, central planning--has also been shown to stifle initiative and produce economic stagnation. Since its early stirrings in eighteenth century Britain, modern economic development has been...

PanIP claims that if you use graphical and textual information on a video screen for purposes of making a sale, then you are infringing on its patent. Read more on this story here.Patents. They protect us when we come up with a great piece of technology, and allow us to reap the rewards from our hard work and intellectual property. As a creator of intellectual property myself, I thoroughly understand and support the need for patent and copyright laws. Without them, innovation and creativity would be severely stifled.But they can be abused. A company called PanIP holds patents that it...

A Washington court ruling could see SQL Server developers liable for millions of dollars in licensing fees. The judgment concerns a contract dispute between Timeline Inc. and Microsoft, over three patents relating to datamarts. In Microsoft's interpretration of its licence with Timeline, published in a press release in July 1999, "all users of Microsoft SQL Server 7, Office 2000 and other Microsoft products that utilize this type of technology are unencumbered by Timeline's patents." Timeline disagreed. The Washington Court of Appeal judgement plumped for the company. The company reckons that some SQL Server developers could face bills in the...

SBC Wants Your Money How I, Cringely Readers Can Overturn an Unpopular Patent This column is about U.S. patent 5,933,841, which was granted to the old Ameritech phone company in 1999, and is now owned by Ameritech's acquirer,SBC Communications.  It is a patent you will be hearing more about because nearly every modern web page appears to violate it, maybe even this one.  I HATE when that happens! There are no villains in this story.  The patent exists and was applied for on May 17, 1996.  That was very early in the era of the commercial Internet, back when...

Patents a virtue for IBM By John G. SpoonerStaff Writer, CNET News.comJanuary 12, 2003, 9:00 PM PT IBM will announce on Monday that it was the top recipient of U.S. patents in 2002.Big Blue was awarded 3,288 patents during the past year, making it the top recipient among private sector companies for the 10th year in a row, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Canon ranked second during in 2002 with 1,893 patents. IBM has generated just over 22,000 patents during the last 10 years, but those patents have changed with the times, IBM researchers said. Many of...

Poor countries have little to gain and plenty to lose from adopting Western standards of patent protection, a group of experts appointed by the British government said on Thursday. The Commission on Intellectual Property Rights concluded that a global drive to expand patent protection would mean higher-priced medicines and seeds for most developing countries, with no significant benefit for their local industries. Activists have long campaigned against the blanket adoption of patents in the developing world, arguing it leads to inflated prices for drugs to treat AIDS and other deadly conditions in Africa. Western companies say patents are vital for...

FEATURE STORY | Special Report Big Pharma, Bad Science by Nathan Newman n June, the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most respected medical journals, made a startling announcement. The editors declared that they were dropping their policy stipulating that authors of review articles of medical studies could not have financial ties to drug companies whose medicines were being analyzed. The reason? The journal could no longer find enough independent experts. Drug company gifts and "consulting fees" are so pervasive that in any given field, you cannot find an expert who has not been paid off in some...

A small videoconferencing company is laying claim to the ubiquitous JPEG format, igniting a backlash from some consumers and from a standards organization. Austin, Texas-based Forgent Networks posted a press release to its site earlier this month claiming to own a patent covering the technology behind JPEG, one of the most popular formats for compressing and sharing images on the Internet. According to the firm, the devices covered by the patent include cameras, cell phones, camcorders, personal digital assistants, scanners and other devices. It took a little more than a week for the statement to find its way to the...