"The following is a transcript of a talk given in New Zealand, 2010. Andrew Tridgell discusses why reading patents is usually a good idea, how to read a patent, and how to work through it with a lawyer to build a solid defence. For the free software community, Tridgell also suggests how cooperation could help scare off patent holders. "

Source: http://news.swpat.org/2010/03/transcript-tridgell-patents/

"In Marshall, Texas, a patent that seems to cover the act of distributing a press release online (No. 6,370,535) was used to sue six companies that are in that business; […] The business proposition of eReleases, one of the defendants, is simple: For a one-time fee […] eReleases distributes press releases […] [f]or an additional fee, [it] will write a release. […] the [patent] application wasn't even filed until 1999—a year after he started his business. After a few hours’ online research, Kennedy found no less than 20 companies involved in the press release business before the filing date of the patent. Unfortunately, presenting that evidence in court would require him to pay those six-figure legal bills."

Source: http://thepriorart.typepad.com/the_prior_art/2010/07/gooseberry-natural-resources-patents-press-releases.html

"Let's start with what everyone knows—NPE patent litigation isn't going away. Since 2007, more than 1,500 companies per year are hit with lawsuits brought by the more than 300 NPEs that PatentFreedom track (using its fairly conservative definition of what constitutes an NPE). NPE litigation has grown from where it accounted for between 2 to 3 percent of all patent suits a decade ago to the point that it now accounts for 17 percent . For some operating companies, NPE litigation makes up more than 90 percent of their patent litigation docket."

Source: http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202464087434&Patent_Litigation_Weekly_Data_Shows_That_Troll_Problem_Persists

"A new lawsuit filed this week has accused Apple, Google and numerous others of patent infringement, alleging that the companies are improperly profiting from spam filtering technology created by InNova. The complaint was filed on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Marshall.
The suit deals with U.S. Patent No. 6,018,761, related to technology that is used to differentiate between regular e-mail messages and unwanted advertising spam."

Source: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/07/21/apple_among_36_companies_targeted_in_e_mail_spam_patent_suit.html

"Why do entrepreneurs and startup companies file for patents? Why not? How often do startups acquire patents from others? How important are patents in fostering innovation at startups? In helping them raise financing? In providing leverage in cross-licensing negotiations? Are entrepreneurs and startups subject to patent thickets? These and many related questions were the subject of the Berkeley Patent Survey—the most comprehensive survey to date in the United States, probably worldwide, on how patents are used by and affect entrepreneurs, startups, and early-stage high technology companies.
[…] First, startups hold many more patents and applications than previously believed. […]
Second, startups report that they primarily file for patents to prevent against copying of their innovative products and services. […]
Our third major finding concerns startup executives' perceptions of the effectiveness of patents and other methods of providing competitive advantage. Interestingly, responses vary widely (see Fig. 2 below). Biotechnology companies rate patents as the most effective means of capturing competitive advantage, more effective than first-mover advantage (though the differences are not statistically significant), trade secrecy, reverse engineering, copyright, and other means. Software companies, on the other hand, rank patenting dead last in providing competitive advantage. "

Source: http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/07/patenting-by-entrepreneurs-the-berkeley-patent-survey-part-i-of-iii-1.html

Here are part II and part III of the survey:

"Our fourth major result is that our respondents—particularly software companies—find the high costs of patenting and enforcing their patents deter them from filing for patents on their innovations. […]
Last, we asked how much of a role patents play in the steps of the innovation process, […]. Somewhat surprisingly, the responses on the whole are rather tepid. For instance, biotechnology companies report that patents provide closer to a "moderate" than a "strong" incentive to engage in the innovation process. Among software companies, the results are even more striking, with them reporting that patents provide less than a "slight" incentive."

Source: http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/07/patenting-by-entrepreneurs-the-berkeley-patent-survey-part-ii-of-iii.html

"We acknowledge that our analysis to date of the study results do not allow us to say one way or the other whether the views of the executives accurately reflect the economics of the patent system. Thus, it would be wrong to conclude […] that one of the key findings of our study is that patents "play essentially no role in fostering innovation among startup companies … outside biotech and other limited areas." In the same fashion, it may also be wrong to conclude that […] the reality is that patents play a major role in promoting innovation. […] As such, we come to no conclusions in this article regarding the actual role patents play in fostering startup innovation (or not). […] The data, however, present an interesting paradox: If executives believe that patents provide relatively weak incentives to innovate, why are so many startup firms seeking them?"

http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/07/patenting-by-entrepreneurs-the-berkeley-patent-survey-part-iii-of-iii.html

Packt, publisher of specialist IT books, has today announced the launch of new discounts for any orders of multiple books. Visitors to www.PacktPub.com who purchase 2-4 books will automatically receive an 18% discount, while those who purchase 5-10 books will receive 20% off of the books’ cover prices.

These discounts are available across all of Packt’s hard copy books bought via the company’s website, and organisations of all sizes are offered the opportunity to obtain books for their employees or members at discounted prices.

Larger discounts are on offer as well. If a greater number of books are required, an email address has been set up ( BulkSales at PacktPub.com ) to help customers contact us about ordering in bulk much more efficiently. “Particularly since the launch of Packt Enterprise and Packt Open Source, Packt’s books are becoming ever more focussed, and therefore increasingly relevant to the specific needs of larger organisations.”, said Mark Nichols, marketing executive at Packt Publishing. “These new, easy to access discounts means that facilitating purchases in bulk will be much more simple.”

"while Justice Anthony Kennedy’s controlling opinion may not do much to change the status quo when it comes to the patent system, the more interesting Bilski story is one of an important "almost"—an "almost" that by all indications was hard-fought.
Indeed, for some folks—including those who hoped the Court would use the case to limit what they see as a plague of spurious patent litigation—this has to be a particularly painful “almost.”
While the justices were united in denying a patent to the Rand Warsaw and Bernard Bilski’s invention, they split 5-4 on the most important issue: whether it is ever appropriate to grant patents to a method of doing business."

Source: http://thepriorart.typepad.com/the_prior_art/2010/07/post-bilski-landscape-attempt-to-ban-biz-meth-patents-fails.html#more

"The German Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof) has recently made clear that every court has to take into account preceding decisions of the European Patent Office (EPO) and of courts of other contracting states to the European Patent Convention (EPC) if these decisions essentially concern the same questions. Although there is no principle of precedence in Germany – neither in respect of German nor of foreign decisions –, the recent ruling of the Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof, 15 April 2010, Xa ZB 10/09 – “Walzenformgebungsmaschine”) requires more than just regarding other decisions with favour. Every court has the obligation to deal with the arguments brought forward in other – German, EPO or foreign – decisions."

Source: http://kluwerpatentblog.com/2010/07/06/german-federal-supreme-court-strengthens-the-significance-of-epos-and-foreign-courts-decisions/

"What Bilski means for software is that the advantages of starting software businesses abroad have become even more clear. The tax situation and cost of living in, say, South America, is much better than in the U.S. currently. Now that startups have to live in fear of the uncertainty of the U.S. patent system, when they could be wiped off the face of the Earth by legal fees and customer loss in the span of a few months by the mere filing of a patent suit, and with an entire government that seems to have no sympathy toward their small businesses, why start a software company in the United States?"

Source: http://www.jasonmendelson.com/wp/archives/2010/06/bilski-redux-and-why-you-shouldnt-believe-everything-you-read.php

"Bilski also lines up perfectly for the scenario of a lost majority. It is a five-to-four decision. Justices Kennedy and Stevens are the authors of the principal opinions. The ruling took a long time to issue – it was argued in November but not decided until the last day of the Term – suggesting that something may have been amiss.
The Stevens opinion also reads as if it were originally an opinion for the Court […]. Further, the muddled vote of the majority’s fifth vote, Justice Scalia – who joined the majority in part and Justice Breyer’s concurrence in substantial part – suggests that he had significant difficulty in resolving the case. […] Another piece of evidence of rough compromise in Bilski is the Kennedy opinion itself. While it does decide the case, it is surpassingly narrow. It rejects the Federal Circuit’s “machine or transformation” test as the exclusive test of patentability and stops there. The Court does not attempt to provide further guidance, which is some evidence that five Justices could not agree on how to articulate an appropriate test. For all those reasons, it seems quite likely to me that Justice Stevens was originally going to author the Court’s opinion in Bilski but subsequently lost his majority to Justice Kennedy. […]
Finally, there remains the “so what” question. […] On the broadest level of whether the Court might revisit Bilski in a later case when Justice Scalia has the opportunity to consider the matter further, I think the answer is clearly no. In statutory cases like this one […] the Justices try to adhere to stare decisis. The decision in Bilski settles the question that business methods are patentable subject matter until Congress decides otherwise."

Source: http://www.scotusblog.com/2010/07/business-method-patents-nearly-bite-the-dust/

"[…] As near as I can tell from what I've learned, the entire “Bilski thing” appears to be a no-op. In short, as before, the Patent Office sometimes can and will deny applications that it determines are only abstract ideas, and the Supreme Court has now confirmed that the Patent Office can reject such an application if the Patent Office "knows an abstract idea when it sees it". Nothing has changed regarding most patents that are granted every day, including those that read on software. Those of us that oppose software patents continue to believe that software algorithms are indeed merely abstract ideas and pure mathematics and shouldn't be patentable subject matter. The governmental powers still seems to disagree with us, or, at least, just won't comment on that question.
Looking forward, my largest concern, from a policy perspective, is that the “patent reform” crowd, who claim to be the allies of the anti-software-patent folks, will use this decision to declare that "the system works". […]
We must not yield to the patent reformists, particularly at a time like this. […]
Since Bilski has given us no new tools for abolishing software patents, we must redouble efforts with tools we already have to mitigate the threat patents pose to software freedom."

Source: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/06/30/bilski.html

"A day after reaching a decision in the business methods patent case Bilski v. Kappos, the Supreme Court this week remanded the diagnostic patent case Prometheus Laboratories v. Mayo Collaborative Services et al., to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals with an order to revisit the case in light of Bilski.
The lower court must now reconsider Prometheus with the understanding that the so-called "machine-or-transformation test" cannot be the sole determinant for patentability. While this presents an opportunity for the Federal Circuit to come up with new methods for determining patentability with regard to advanced technologies not grounded in a physical platform, nothing in the Supreme Court's recent actions sheds light on how the courts might deal with method patents related to genetic testing."

Source: http://www.genomeweb.com/dxpgx/supreme-court-tasks-lower-court-determining-criteria-dx-patentability?page=show

"Whenever Justice Kennedy waxes poetic about the Information Age, Justice Scalia gets off the bus. The result is an exceptionally narrow holding that doesn’t give much comfort to partisans on either side.[…]
The primary winners from all this are the patent lawyers. Not only are there few restrictions on what can be patented, but the high court’s failure to articulate a clear rule means even more litigation. All is not lost, though. Justice Stevens is retiring, but Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor all signed onto his opinion. If Justice Kagan sides with her fellow liberals, then they’ll need just one more vote to restore some sanity to patent law. As the patent system continues to inflict damage on the IT industry, the need for reform will only get more obvious. Hopefully, the next time the Supreme Court has an opportunity to fix the problem, Justice Scalia will get off the fence."

Source: http://timothyblee.com/2010/06/29/justice-scalias-indecision-a-victory-for-the-patent-bar/

"[…] as more people have had more time to look at and sift through the rulings in greater detail, some are realizing there may actually be a light at the end of the tunnel for those who dislike software patents. Contrary to the claims of the IEEE, the ruling did not, in fact, come out and say that software patents are legit. It sidestepped that question — in part due to Justice Scalia's decision to opt-out of two sections of Kennedy's majority opinion."

Source: http://techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20100701/16343110051&utm_medium=bt.io-twitter&utm_source=direct-bt.io&utm_content=backtype-tweetcount

"'In our amicus brief, BIO urged the Supreme Court to overturn the lower court's rigid new test for determining whether a method or process is eligible for patenting. We are pleased that the Justices crafted a narrow opinion that does just that. The Court was clearly conscious of the potential negative and unforeseeable consequences of a broad and sweeping decision', stated BIO President and CEO Jim Greenwood."

Source: http://news.thomasnet.com/companystory/BIO-Commends-Supreme-Court-on-expansive-view-of-patentability-579527

"Although all of the justices agreed that the invention at issue was unpatentable, the opinion is fractionated, with justices joining various pieces of the opinion, and Justices Stevens and Breyer writing concurrences to elaborate their views hostile to patenting in the information sector. Justice Kennedy's plurality decision held that the Federal Circuit's Machine-or-Transformation test could not be an exclusive test under section 101, although subsequent tests could be propounded consistent with the Court's precedent. […]
To many, the Supreme Court punted the issue and created more issues, e.g., in litigation. Although clarity would have been appreciated, the court, mindful of the minefield through which it was treading, desiring to avoid unforeseen aftereffects, such as those that chilled the software industry decades ago."

Source: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/Bilski-Brouhaha-Supreme-Court-Keeps-Stevens-at-Bay-70327.html?wlc=1278359841

"If online videos were subject to patent licensing fees, users could be charged per-view to capture those fees. […] video licensing could reduce the democratic nature of free and open Internet content to monetizable media. The funny cat videos would be gone forever (perhaps not the greatest loss), but so too would the movement-inspiring Nedas of the future remain unknown. […] As the Web incorporates multimedia, some participants want to control — and charge for — its video standards. […] Some participants in the online video discussion claim that common video codecs […] cannot be implemented without infringing their patents. One codec under popular consideration for use in HTML5 is H.264 (a.k.a. MPEG-4 AVC), already used for an estimated 66% of all online video content, including Hulu and YouTube. Yet H.264 is also claimed to be subject to a pool of patents controlled by MPEG-LA, a limited liability corporation that describes itself as the "world’s leading packager of patent pools for standards and other technology platforms.""

Source: http://oti.newamerica.net/blogposts/2010/video_prison_why_patents_might_threaten_free_online_video-33950

"The Supreme Court, as expected, dealt the final blow to Pittsburgh inventor Rand Warsaw's dream of patenting a method for hedging energy costs against changes in the weather. In doing so, however, the court didn't upset the foundations of the multibillion-dollar world of "business method patents," which are based less on a particular machine than a process for achieving some practical end.
It was an anticlimactic end to a case whose decision was so long delayed that some speculated the justices were deadlocked over how far to rein in what some see as an out-of-control patent process. Instead, the court rejected a narrow test that would require patents to involve a machine or transformation of matter and merely said patents can't cover an abstract idea.
"It looks like what people actually thought it would be, before it took forever," said John Dragseth of Fish & Richardson in Minneapolis. "Not much has changed from what thoughtful people thought the law should be.""

Source: http://blogs.forbes.com/docket/2010/06/28/the-supreme-court-keeps-business-method-patents-alive/

"Anyone hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court would limit the ability to patent software will be disappointed by Monday's ruling. The court ruled against patent applicants Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw […]. But the majority of justices stopped far short of a broader ruling that would have curbed so-called business method patents — and perhaps software patents as well. "

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20009019-264.html

"The bottom line: contrary to some reports, experts say that the 5-4 ruling offers little to no change in business method and software patents. “It was a rather uneventful opinion and kind of what we asked for,” said Scott Bain, litigation counsel of the Software & Information Industry Association […]. “Things are pretty similar if not the same as before Bilski."

Source: http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10009237/supreme-court-says-no-to-bilski-decision-yes-to-software-patents/