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• Patents must be held by individuals, not corporate entities

  
  

  The ecomonics of building factories means that corporations are going to want to have the exclusive benefit of a patent, even if they do not own it as such. What would happen if an engineer changed jobs, would the patent rights go with the engineer and, if so, why would anyone pay engineers to invent?

• Only physical objects and processes may be patented.
• (Corrolary) No patent shall be granted for algorithms or business processes
  
  

• Naturally occuring results of processes may not be patented (ex: DNA)

  
  

  You are in the mainstream with these. The US is pretty much out on its own in the degree to which it allows patents for these. See for example Art. 52 European Patent Office and this mauling of Dell by the UK Patent Office.

• A working implementation of the patented process must be provided (upon request of USPTO)

  
  

  Not really possible if the patent application is for a nuclear power station. However, part of the patent deal is that the description is sufficient to teach other skilled people how to work the invention. If the Examiner is suspicious he should raise an objection on this ground but there may be other ways of proving the invention, e.g. using computer models.

• The USPTO must conduct a good faith search for any prior art

  
  

  I think that this is a little hard on the USPTO, which is pretty robust in its searches compared with some other patent offices. If there is a quality issue, it will be down to resources and individual staff competency rather than bad faith.

From a FAQ at the UK Patent Office:

9. People are talking about "technical effect". What is this?

Patents in the UK and Europe are granted for technical inventions (eg: medicines, engines, circuit boards etc.). Innovations which are to be patentable must not only be novel and inventive, but are expected to have a "technical effect". Recent changes in the US mean that over there inventions, apart from being novel and not obvious, need only be "useful", but not technical. Consequently methods for teaching music or methods for undercutting a competitor's price, for example, are now patentable in the US, even though they would not be here because a novel teaching method or pricing strategy have no "technical" character even though they are useful.

Hope that helps. Every definition I found is similarly murky, but I think the meaning comes through.

-dlek

From a FAQ at the UK Patent Office:

9. People are talking about "technical effect". What is this?

Patents in the UK and Europe are granted for technical inventions (eg: medicines, engines, circuit boards etc.). Innovations which are to be patentable must not only be novel and inventive, but are expected to have a "technical effect". Recent changes in the US mean that over there inventions, apart from being novel and not obvious, need only be "useful", but not technical. Consequently methods for teaching music or methods for undercutting a competitor's price, for example, are now patentable in the US, even though they would not be here because a novel teaching method or pricing strategy have no "technical" character even though they are useful.

Hope that helps. Every definition I found is similarly murky, but I think the meaning comes through.

-dlek

Take a look at the independent consultation run in the UK and its very different conclusions (I would go so far as to say much more sensible). If harmonisation were to be called for, Britain could create a stushio about it and kill it yet.

http://www.patent.gov.uk/about/consultations/concl usions.htm

Several months ago, I posted comments here asking people to help make their views known to the UK patent office, which was running a consultation exercise.

I remember replies to that comment which basically said "Don't bother, it's all about money, you're wasting your time" - and these were modded up quite highly.

Well the war may not be over, but a battle has been won. Perhaps if a few more of the doom-spreaders got off their a[rs]ses and did something (even ten minutes effort from the very seat you're sitting in now) perhaps laws like the DMCA and UCITA in the US would not have been passed (this comment is, of course, addressed to those Americans who don't support those laws).

Europe is not exactly divided on software patents.

You have a small, but powerful, group of lawyers that want to see business and software patents. They tried to get this approved before any real studies could be done on the effects of sw/b patents.

These studies are now starting to show up, and it seems like we're winning.

Check the UK patent office conclusion on sw/bm patents.

Not true. The software is not patentable but the technological innovation is. The criteria for the patent detailed here have not changed. It is saying that if the technological innovation must be implemented in software it should not be excluded. Very different from the software being patented. Personally I am very relieved, working for a small innovative software house, that the government has seen what has happened in the US and taken the best course of action. Now if only they will abolish the RIP bill...

Phillip.

Not so, my friend. The main office of the UKPO is in Newport, Gwent (South Wales). There is, however, a London branch office.

I don't know why I'm replying to such an obvious troll, but such a stupid idea is currently unpatentable in the UK (and the rest of the EU I believe), both because its moronic and because you can't patent software here at the moment. The UK patent office was recently consulting about opening this sort of patent up. More details, including the address to send to can be found here (the consulting period may well be over now)

(see The Register and Silicon.com)

Iridigm's technology, which sounds to me too much like a satellite business, call their tech "I-mod"

I'd post a link to the Trademarks Office if the server was not down (business UK hours only) but British Telecom just tried all the related names to annoy NTT DoCoMO with their 'phone kit :

Once you have a trademark registration, btw, you have a good claim against "confusingly similar" marques.

and once you've filed you have a superior claim in Madrid Treaty countries (US recognises this) from date of application of registered trademark Not the actual first use of a name.

you have to see an excerpt of the class descriptions for the application to believe this :

I had to cut the actual text because of Lameness Filter. But you can search for yourself tomorrow :-)

an excerpt from class 9 of the application: transmission, reception, processing, retrieval, reproduction, manipulation, analysis, display and print-out of sound, images and/or data; computer hardware and firmware; computer software; digital communications apparatus and instruments

the names : Status: Pending Mark Text: I-MODE Mark Text: i-mode Mark Text: i-MODE Mark Text: I-mode Mark Text: I.MODE Mark Text: i.mode Mark Text: I.mode Mark Text: i.MODE Mark Text: I MODE Mark Text: i mode Mark Text: i MODE Mark Text: I mode M

Note that if you live in the US, they explicitly ask "If you have any experience of the US position on patenting software or business methods, how would you assess it ?".

The EU already issues patents on software, 15% of UK patents being granted now are software-base. The debate is about the critera for a patent.

In the uk a pantent on software must be a new and non-obvious, this is a bit better in the rest of the EU where a technical effect must be demonstrated, so a disk cache program would be parentable, but a image view wouldn't be.

The UK patent office is curently seeking opionions about software patents. Your views may count.

Go to their homepage and follow the links.

We want our views heard, so keep replies polite, considered etc. etc. (you know the drill).

Also make sure to respond to the UK patent office's request for opinions. And they explicitly ask for opinions for people with experience of the US position.

If Europe accepts the American position on patents, how is America ever going to change it ?

Remember, the Reuters report says they were "inundated" with only 400 e-mails.

The one thing that this highlights in big bold underlined (but not hyperlinked!!!) is that the US patent office needs some serious updating.

Relevant bit from the UK patents office, also most people in the UK wouldn't be able to do this as you have to register your patent inthe UK before you are allowed to register it internationally, but I guess if you have a presence there. . .

also, The Register articleThey have a link to the patent, apparently it was filed in 1976, when came gopher?

Tim suggests a slashdot-like site to post and coment on proposed patents.

There are already sites discussing the desirability/undesirability of software patents (eg, here), and at least one database of prior art. Rumor has it that ther is also a new-patent site somewhere, but I've not found it.

So, who's interested in getting the appropriate folks together with slashcode to build just such a site?

The European test is still close to this: a computer program "as such" is considered just to be a method for performing a "mental act", and is therefore specifically excluded from patentability. However, under guidelines the EPO brought in in 1985, computer programs are patentable if they have a "technical effect".

For more information, see:
http://www.ladas.com/GUIDE S/COMPUTER/Computer.EPOJP.html
and
http://www.jurisdiction.com/epc.htm
which includes the text of the section of the law in question.

This had led to some truly classic decisions, a real must for connoisseurs of the mind-numbingly pedantic and the bizarre:

• A claim for an image processing system was disallowed because the wording, "A method of digitally filtering data including scanning a data array with masks...", specified no physical entity that the data represented, so was held to be a purely mental act; an amended version, "A method of digitally processing images in the form of a 2D array..." would have been okay, except they then discovered it wasn't novel.

• Word processing, according to the Board, is just a series of mental acts. This lacks technical significance and is therefore not patentable. Since there is no technical effect, this also rules out any methods for spell-checking, or for contextually identifying incorrect homophones ('there' instead of 'their')

• But an IBM invention, to translate printer control codes into different control codes for a different system, was patentable, because it related to the control of machinery (a clear technical effect).

I also found a one-day seminar with most of the main players, held a couple of years ago:
http://www.patent.gov.uk/softpat/en /frmain.html
but the couple of speakers I read seemed mostly to be congratulating themselves on how sensible they were.

Strange world, patent law...