An Insider's View of Software Patents

An anonymous reader writes "Ross Gittins at the Sydney Morning Herald has published an interesting insider view of software patents. This kind of thing is starting to be a hot issue down here with the US-Australia Free Trade deal about to be ratified and bring our intellectual property laws in line with Micros^D^D^D^D^D^D^D America's."

Comments

One quick way to improve the situation

[theluckyleper]

IANAL, but one way to improve the patent situation (and the IP situation too, for that matter), which I didn't see mentioned in the article, would be to impose a statute of limitation on infringement suits. This is how they do things in China.

China?! Yes, that's right. Some of their laws are better than ours...

This would prevent asshats like Unisys (and, if applied to IP, asshats like SCO) from suing for infringement WELL after they became aware of the issue. A statute of limitaion would ensure that underhanded tactics such as allowing the public to become addicted to GIFs, and then suing years and years later, would no longer be effective.

This wouldn't solve all of the problems with software patents, but I think it's a step in the right direction!

Re:I'll say it again....

[Sebby]

Then we also need to have the PTO and IP laws changed: file all the patents you want, even the kitchen sink; when an infringment suit comes along, the patent is re-examined before any lawsuits are allowed to go forth. Then when there truely is patent infrigment and the patent holds up, let the lawsuit go forth.

This would avoid the common scenario where the defendant is sued out of existance even though the case has no merit!