Free Republic

Up in the AirWill America lose its dominance of the skies? There were a number of reasons last week to look up to the sky and wonder about the future of airpower. In a world in which the United States will have smaller ground and naval forces, we will likely become more dependent on land- and sea-based airpower to deter or defeat enemies. The proper employment of air assets as part of a joint force allows for nearly instantaneous response to crises, saves American lives, and can bring pinpoint devastation to an enemy’s forces and command-and-control systems. Yet along with...

If necessity is the mother of invention, patents are its delinquent offspring, providing stumbling blocks to innovation and progress, inhibiting the free exchange of ideas, and restricting our knowledge of how things work, says Richard Hillesley… Pablo Picasso is supposed to have said that “all art is theft”. The assertion may be controversial, but the intention is clear – the creative process, which relies on the evolution of techniques, observation and criticism, is an assimilation of that which has gone before, and all creativity, whether artistic, technological or scientific, walks a thin line between innovation and originality, plagiarism and parody....

The patent goes back all the way to the original iMac in 1998 to describe a technology that enables a light source to be coordinated with certain computing events. The hardware foundation uses a light controller that is connected to the main CPU of the computer as well as a light source. In Apple's words, we are talking about: "computing device includes a housing having an illuminable portion. The computing device also includes a light device disposed inside the housing. The light device is configured to illuminate the illuminable portion." Apple expands on this idea a bit further and notes...

Obama sang a different tune at his press conference on Thursday. While he said that “patent reform” will help the country be competitive, he admitted that “there's nobody out there who actually thinks that that is going to immediately fill the needs of people who are out of work or strengthen the economy right now.”

President Obama signed a bill to help Americans get patents for inventions Friday morning, but in his speech at a science and tech school in northern Virginia, he quickly pivoted to talking about his jobs bill that has rankled both Republicans and Democrats. After acknowledging a handful of members of Congress in his audience at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Obama said he didn’t want to pass up the chance to make another pitch for his plan. “I’ve got another bill that I want to get passed to help the economy right away. It’s called the American Jobs Act,”...

On the day we arrived in Washington, April 12, 1997, we tuned in to C-Span just in time to see the House of Representatives pass H.400 on a voice vote. Not one member of the House of Representatives demanded a roll call vote on a bill that would severely emasculate a core function of the federal government. When we were finally able to obtain a copy of S.507, we read it very carefully and we were horrified. Never in all of our years as lobbyists had we ever read a worse piece of legislation. If we had ever wondered what...

On the one hand, the tech industry is awash in patent trolls, companies that own generally spurious patents for technologies they didn't really invent, which exist solely to sue other companies into licensing said technologies. On the other, we have tech companies that have patents for technologies that they did, in fact, invent (or at least purchase legitimately) and, as important, use in actual products. These companies, too, must sue others to protect their patents, but for far more legitimate reasons. Google is upset about the latter kind of company, and it's citing two heavy-hitters, Apple and Microsoft, as example...

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is seeking to invalidate a pair of Apple patents so the underlying technologies can be used as part of a royalty-free HTML5 stack.The W3C's call for prior art is necessary, the organisation argues, because it maintains a strict policy of validating Web standards that can be used without paying for royalties. By finding examples of the technology in use before Apple filed the patents, the W3C can render those patents invalid. The patented technologies are core components to the W3C's Widget Access Request Policy, which specifies how mobile applications can request sensitive material. It...

America’s 200-year-old patent system is about to be reformed, and the changes will cut out the very heart of innovation in this country, warn many independent inventors, small business owners, and manufacturers, angel investors and venture capitalists. “We are playing Russian roulette with the basis of the American economy, which is innovation,” said Kevin Kearns, president of the U.S. Business and Industry Council (USBIC). Critics say the reforms will devastate opportunities for the disruptive innovators of the future—the start-ups and independents who could invent the next iPhone challenger, for example. It will also promote the domination of patents, and patent...

...The legislation, supported by the Obama administration and a broad range of business groups and high tech companies, aims to ease the lengthy backlog in patent applications, clean up some of the procedures that can lead to costly litigation and put the United States under the same filing system as the rest of the industrialized world. The Senate passed a similar bill last March on a 95-5 vote. If the bill makes it to the White House for the president's signature, it could be one of the first congressional actions this year to have a concrete effect on business after months...

Microsoft Corp suffered a defeat on Thursday when the Supreme Court upheld a record $290 million jury verdict against the software giant for infringing a small Canadian company's patent. The justices unanimously agreed with a U.S. appeals court ruling that went against the world's largest software company in its legal battle with Toronto-based i4i. The high court refused to adopt Microsoft's lower standard to replace the long-standing requirement that a defendant in a patent infringement case prove by clear and convincing evidence that a plaintiff's patent is invalid. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft had argued that a lower standard of proof involving...

Lipitor. Actos. Plavix. These are some of the most-prescribed medicines in the U.S., drugs that are so commonplace they are responsible for a huge chunk of the $300 billion spent on brand-name pharmaceuticals each year. That is about to change as patents on these pricey pills begin to expire, opening the door for generic competition. And that can translate to savings of up to 90 percent, analysts say, making these drugs affordable to more consumers. Americans will see cheaper copies of some of the biggest drug names starting this fall. Out-of-pocket costs of the generic form of Lipitor, a widely...

It is axiomatic that the struggling U.S. economy is slowly climbing out of its hole. President Obama and our elected representatives regularly wax eloquent about job growth, innovation and the opportunity and future for the once-great United States. But the recovery, critics say, given the depths of the worldwide economic melt-down of 2008, is far too anemic, and job growth too stunted, all because of cumbersome, growth-stifling laws and policies. It is also axiomatic that most, if not all, net job creation in the U.S. today comes from small, entrepreneurial companies less than five years old. As Kauffman Foundation economist...

I have been reporting on Microsoft all my journalistic life, and believe me, that's quite some time. To give you an idea how far I go back with Microsoft, let's just say I remember the occasion when I was given a personal demo of a hot new product that Microsoft was about to launch – a graphical spreadsheet for the Macintosh, later known as Excel. I was particularly impressed by the evident passion of the person demonstrating the beta code – he clearly really enjoyed his job. But perhaps that wasn't so surprising, since his name was Bill Gates.Of course,...

“Patents would be issued to whoever files applications first and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would be allowed to set its own fees under a measure introduced today in the U.S. House of Representatives [H.R. 1249],” Susan Decker and Eric Engleman report for Bloomberg. “The proposal, sponsored by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, is similar to legislation passed by the Senate in a 95-5 vote on March 8. If approved and made law, it would mark a fundamental change in how patents are reviewed and the biggest revision to U.S. patent law since 1952.” “The...

In an attempt to spur the growth of innovation in the energy sector, The US Department of Energy is slashing the costs for startup energy companies for licensing patents held by the US government's National Laboratories in a "New Top Energy Innovator" challenge.

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- The U.S. may put an end to patents for human DNA and other genes, potentially changing the way biotechnology companies develop new drugs, the New York Times reported late Friday. In a brief filed by the Department of Justice, the U.S. concluded genes are a part of nature, and therefore not an invention, the newspaper reported.

"Apple Inc. was ordered by a jury to pay damages to Mirror Worlds LLC for infringing patents related to how documents are displayed on a computer screen," Susan Decker reports for Bloomberg. "The federal jury in Tyler, Texas, awarded $208.5 million in damages for each of the patents infringed. The verdict form was unclear as to whether the amount applies to the three patents collectively or would be charged individually. Lawyers for closely held Mirror Worlds declined to discuss the verdict," Decker reports. MacDailyNews Take: Tyler, Texas. Rocket Docket. Decker reports, "Mirror Worlds, a software business started by a Yale...

Just one day after the Democrats seized control of Congress, the Chief Executive of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines, received the patent for a residential cap-and-trade system (Patent 6904336), What this means is that Raines, along with several colleagues who also “own” the patent, could stand to make huge amounts of money if the cap-and-trade regime was ever brought to the residential marketplace. What does this have to do with Fannie Mae? Absolutely nothing. To understand the implications, a little discussion about patenting is needed. Patents are basically “ownership” rights to an invention. If you invent something, you can license it...

NEW YORK—Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. on Tuesday announced that it would shut down eight manufacturing plants around the world, scale back production at several other sites, and slash 6,000 total jobs in its ongoing restructuring effort to cut down on payroll expense. The job cuts are related to its $68 billion acquisition of rival Wyeth last year and part of an announced 19,000 job cuts to be enacted by 2015. Such expense reductions were expected at Pfizer, based in New York, as the company braces itself to lose its patent on cholesterol drug Lipitor, which accounted for more than $11...