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   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...