Slashdot Mirror
Software Patent Sanity on the Way?
Ars Technica is reporting that the traditionally silent US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) may be starting to turn things around. It seems that in recent action the USPTO has started to make it much easier to invalidate software patents with some saying that the abolition of such patents may be in the distant future. "Duffy cites four recent cases that illustrate the Patent Office's growing hostility to the patenting of software and other abstract concepts. While the USPTO hasn't formally called for the abolition of software patents, the positions it took in these cases do suggest a growing skepticism. In the first two cases, decided last fall, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (which has jurisdiction over patent appeals) upheld patent rejections by the USPTO. They were not software patent cases, as such. In In Re Nuijten, the court considered a patent related to an algorithm for adding a watermark to a digital media file. The Federal Circuit did not invalidate the claims relating to the watermarking algorithm itself; everyone seemed to agree that the algorithm was patentable. Rather, the decision focused on whether a digital signal could be the subject of a patent claim. The court concluded that it could not. A victory for common sense, perhaps, but hardly a rejection of software patents."
From the article:
Innocent infringement : defendant was not aware of any copyright infringement, and upon information and belief some or all of the copies which she downloaded did not bear copyright notice.
This looks very weird - when people rip CDs and DVDs, they rarely (if ever) attach any copyright notice to the resulting mp3 and avi files... Would it mean, that because the copyright notice has been removed (it was on the CD case for sure, or the load screen of the DVD), then you don't know you are infringing? As much as I applaud the rest of the complaints, this is just silly. On the internet it is mostly: "everything is copyrighted except if it's explicitly noted", not the other way around...
On the other hand, if it gets accepted, then everyone is pretty innocent from this point on... Would be fun. :)
Oh wow, you got eight points instead of seven.
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.