I am loving this. Particularly this:

At trial in East Texas Cheng took the stand to tell Newegg's story. Alcatel-Lucent's corporate representative, at the heart of its massive licensing campaign, couldn't even name the technology or the patents it was suing Newegg over.

"Successful defendants have their litigation managed by people who care," said Cheng. "For me, it's easy. I believe in Newegg, I care about Newegg. Alcatel Lucent, meanwhile, they drag out some random VP—who happens to be a decorated Navy veteran, who happens to be handsome and has a beautiful wife and kids—but the guy didn't know what patents were being asserted. What a joke."

"Shareholders of public companies that engage in patent trolling should ask themselves if they're really well-served by their management teams," Cheng added. "Are they properly monetizing their R&D? Surely there are better ways to make money than to just rely on litigating patents. If I was a shareholder, I would take a hard look as to whether their management was competent."

Great investigative journalism, interviewing the legal team behind the current big patent-troll shakedown; that on scanning documents with a button press, using a scanner attached to a network. They express whole-hearted belief in the legality of their actions, unsurprisingly -- they're exactly what you think they'd be like (via Nelson)

Next April 11th, at the IIEA in North Gt Georges St:

Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, will examine the case for reform of copyright and patent law in the EU. Legalised file sharing, free sampling and shortened copyright protection times are the main elements of a proposal co-authored by Mr. Falkvinge which was submitted to the European Parliament in 2012. He will question whether, in the context of ever-increasing online activity, existing legal frameworks pose a threat to users’ civil liberties.

Joel On Software weighs in (via Tony Finch):

The fastest growing industry in the US right now, even during this time of slow economic growth, is probably the patent troll protection racket industry.

This seems pretty significant. Is the tide turning in the Texas Eastern District against patent trolls, at last? And does it establish sufficient precedent?

A federal judge has thrown out a patent claim against Rackspace, ruling that mathematical algorithms can’t be patented. The ruling in the Eastern Disrict stemmed from a 2012 complaint filed by Uniloc USA asserting that processing of floating point numbers by the Linux operating system was a patent violation.

Chief Judge Leonard Davis based the ruling on U.S. Supreme Court case law that prohibits the patenting of mathematical algorithms. According to Rackspace, this is the first reported instance in which the Eastern District of Texas has granted an early motion to dismiss finding a patent invalid because it claimed unpatentable subject matter.

Red Hat, which supplies Linux to Rackspace, provided Rackspace’s defense. Red Hat has a policy of standing behind customers through its Open Source Assurance program.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5455869 for more discussion.

Bet you didn't think the US software patents situation could get worse? wrong!

“Now it’s really important to be the first to file, and it’s really important to file before somebody else puts a product out, or puts the invention in their product,” says Barr, adding that it will “create a new urgency on the part of everyone to file faster -- and that’s going to be a problem for the small inventor.”

Very cool account of Newegg's battle against a ludicrous patent-troll shakedown. Great quote from their Chief Legal Officer, Lee Cheng:

Patent trolling is based upon deficiencies in a critical, but underdeveloped, area of the law. The faster we drive these cases to verdict, and through appeal, and also get legislative reform on track, the faster our economy will be competitive in this critical area. We're competing with other economies that are not burdened with this type of litigation. China doesn't have this, South Korea doesn't have this, Europe doesn't have this. [...]

It's actually surprising how quickly people forget what Lemelson did. [referring to Jerome Lemelson, an infamous patent troll who used so-called "submarine patents" to make billions in licensing fees.] This activity is very similar. Trolls right now "submarine" as well. They use timing, like he used timing. Then they pop up and say "Hello, surprise! Give us your money or we will shut you down!" Screw them. Seriously, screw them. You can quote me on that.

We are truly living in the future -- a dystopian future, but one nonetheless. A patent troll manages to obtain "gobbledigook" patents on using a scanner to scan to PDF, then attempts to shake down a bunch of small companies before eventually running into resistance, at which point it "forks" into a bunch of algorithmically-named shell companies, spammer-style, sending the same demands. Those demands in turn contain this beauty of Stockholm-syndrome-inducing prose:

'You should know also that we have had a positive response from the business community to our licensing program. As you can imagine, most businesses, upon being informed that they are infringing someone’s patent rights, are interested in operating lawfully and taking a license promptly. Many companies have responded to this licensing program in such a manner. Their doing so has allowed us to determine that a fair price for a license negotiated in good faith and without the need for court action is a payment of $900 per employee. We trust that your organization will agree to conform your behavior to respect our patent rights by negotiating a license rather than continuing to accept the benefits of our patented technology without a license. Assuming this is the case, we are prepared to make this pricing available to you.'

And here's an interesting bottom line:

The best strategy for target companies? It may be to ignore the letters, at least for now. “Ignorance, surprisingly, works,” noted Prof. Chien in an e-mail exchange with Ars.

Her study of startups targeted by patent trolls found that when confronted with a patent demand, 22 percent ignored it entirely. Compare that with the 35 percent that decided to fight back and 18 percent that folded. Ignoring the demand was the cheapest option ($3,000 on average) versus fighting in court, which was the most expensive ($870,000 on average).

Another tactic that clearly has an effect: speaking out, even when done anonymously. It hardly seems a coincidence that the Project Paperless patents were handed off to a web of generic-sounding LLCs, with demand letters signed only by “The Licensing Team,” shortly after the “Stop Project Paperless” website went up. It suggests those behind such low-level licensing campaigns aren’t proud of their behavior. And rightly so.

Notch comes up with a perfect analogy for software patents.

I am mostly fine with the concept of “selling stuff you made”, so I’m also against copyright infringement. I don’t think it’s quite as bad as theft, and I’m not sure it’s good for society that some professions can get paid over and over long after they did the work (say, in the case of a game developer), whereas others need to perform the job over and over to get paid (say, in the case of a hairdresser or a lawyer). But yeah, “selling stuff you made” is good. But there is no way in hell you can convince me that it’s beneficial for society to not share ideas. Ideas are free. They improve on old things, make them better, and this results in all of society being better. Sharing ideas is how we improve. A common argument for patents is that inventors won’t invent unless they can protect their ideas. The problem with this argument is that patents apply even if the infringer came up with the idea independently. If the idea is that easy to think of, why do we need to reward the person who happened to be first?

Of course, in reality it's even worse, since you don't actually have to be first to invent -- just first to file without sufficient people noticing, and people are actively dissuaded from noticing (since it makes their lives riskier if they know about the existence of patents)...

'SES and Lockheed Martin explored ways to attempt to bring the functioning [AMC-14] satellite into its correct orbital position, and subsequently began attempting to move the satellite into geosynchronous orbit by means of a lunar flyby (as done a decade earlier with HGS-1). In April 2008, it was announced that this had been abandoned after it was discovered that Boeing held a patent on the trajectory that would be required. At the time, a lawsuit was ongoing between SES and Boeing, and Boeing refused to allow the trajectory to be used unless SES dropped its case.' In. credible. http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Boeing_Patent_Shuts_Down_AMC_14_Lunar_Flyby_Salvage_Attempt_999.html notes 'Industry sources have told SpaceDaily that the patent is regarded as legal "trite", as basic physics has been rebranded as a "process", and that the patent wouldn't stand up to any significant level of court scrutiny and was only registered at the time as "the patent office was incompetent when it came to space matters"', but still -- who'd want to go up in court against Boeing?

Just another sad story of how software patenting made a standard useless. "I had once hoped that JBIG-KIT would help with the exchange of scanned documents on the Internet, facilitate online inter-library loans, and make paper archives more accessible to users all over the world. However, the impact was minimal: no web browser dared to directly support a standardized file format covered by 23 patents, the last of which expired today. About 25 years ago, large IT research organizations discovered standards as a gold mine, a vehicle to force users to buy patent licenses, not because the technology is any good, but because it is required for compatibility. This is achieved by writing the standards very carefully such that there is no way to come up with a compatible implementation that does not require a patent license, an art that has been greatly perfected since."

'a set of adapters for complete interoperability between 10 popular construction toys.' this is like a patent-infringement lawsuit magnet, surely. Will make an interesting test case...

'After we moved in, we were asked to file patents for anything and everything we’d invented while working on Upcoming.org.'

'Do intellectual property (IP) rights on existing technologies hinder subsequent
innovation? Using newly-collected data on the sequencing of the human genome by
the public Human Genome Project and the private rm Celera, this paper estimates
the impact of Celera's gene-level IP on subsequent scientic research and product
development. Genes initially sequenced by Celera were held with IP for up to two
years, but moved into the public domain once re-sequenced by the public eort.
Across a range of empirical specications, I nd evidence that Celera's IP led to
reductions in subsequent scientic research and product development on the order of
20 to 30 percent. Taken together, these results suggest that Celera's short-term IP
had persistent negative eects on subsequent innovation relative to a counterfactual
of Celera genes having always been in the public domain.' (via Tony Finch)

'So I was thinking - great they invalidated software patents, lets see what crappy patent written by an idiot they picked to do it - then I realized the idiot in question was me :-)

Not sure how I feel about this.

John - inventor of the patent in question.'

'The operation, called "France Brevets" will buy up patents from small operation and put the French government in charge of [...] shaking down companies for money.' I think the word is: incroyable

'The publication of Digital Opportunity follows a six-month independent review of IP and Growth, led by Professor Ian Hargreaves. He was asked to consider how the national and international IP system can best work to promote innovation and growth.' Some fantastic recommendations here. I hope this provides clear direction to similar Irish efforts...

“While we appreciate your offer to shut down the website to stop future infringement, we notice that your website is still operation. And without further information from you, our only means to assess the potential damages is the observation that your website had 22,256 unique visitors in July 2010. Each visit represents a potential lost sale of our client’s patented invention at $149 per sale. This damage calculation exceeds $3.2 million per month in lost revenue.”

'Pam Samuelson, one of the co-authors of the report, says that her conclusion from the research is that the world may be better off without software patents; that the biggest beneficiaries of software patents are patent lawyers and patent trolls, not entrepreneurs.' no shit, Sherlock

'Apparently Commodore-Amiga owed $10M for patent infringement. Because of that, the US government wouldn't allow any CD-32's into the USA. And because of that, the Phillippines factory seized all of the CD-32's that had been manufactured to cover unpaid expenses. And that was the end'

open audio/video for the web, from Google; VP8 video codec, Ogg for audio, and a subset of Matroska as the container format. still a patents minefield, though, I'd guess

yay, Red Hat beat down patent troll IP Innovation, L.L.C. (a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies), in East Texas no less

incredible. Almost every single modern camera capable of recording video now requires that you obtain a license from MPEG-LA to use recorded footage for commercial purposes. These clauses are currently not enforced, but could be. Horrifying (via Tony Finch)