‘Obviousness’ of patents
p2pnet.net news view:- An article by Anne Broache, Staff Writer, CNET News.com discusses the problem of junk patent that should not have passed the “unobvious” test for patentability.
If the tech outfits get what they want, “you will have more real investment in our research and development, you will have more confident innovators, and you won’t have companies worrying about potentially infringing a patent they know is bogus in the first place,” argued Will Rodger, director of public policy for the Computer and Communications Industry Association. CCIA’s members include Google, Microsoft, Red Hat and Oracle.
I always find it interesting to see where IBM sides on these issues, given they don’t often (and again did not) side with the Free/Libre and Open Source Software community.
In this case it appears that Microsoft is more supportive.
For instance, IBM, which owns a massive patent portfolio, sided with neither KSR’s nor Teleflex’s position, characterizing each side’s views as too extreme.
Canadians should be reminded that, when the Canadian Patent office was consulting with patent lawyers on software patents, IBM’s lawyer was extremely pro-software-patent. (See results of ATIP request)
Given their views on software patents, I still believe IBM, not Microsoft, represents the greatest threat to Free/Libre and Open Source Software.
Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
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November 30th, 2006 at 12:26 pm
Gravity has always been obvious, yet it was never seen by anyone until Newton (Isaac, not Jon) came along.
All ideas are obvious once you are familiar with it, just as nothing is complicated if you know how to do it and have the necessary tools.