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Apple v Samsung
Patents are now an anti-trust weapon rather than a reward for innovation. That’s my conclusion after a weekend trying to decided whether I has happy or sad Apple had beaten Samsung in the...
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Software Patent Solution Under Our Noses
I was blown away by a paper by legal scholar Mark Lemley when I read it in full this week. He plausibly claims there’s a very simple and elegant solution to software patents in the USA that simply...
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Beating A Dead FRAND
Of course FRAND terms are incompatible with software freedom, even if you can find a project that has devised a construct to allow it to attempt to accommodate that incompatibility. When a standard...
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US Hearing To Test Lemley Patents Proposal
A rare en banc hearing of the US federal circuit court today will re-hear the arguments over a fiercely-fought software patent case, CLS Bank vs Alice Corp (the aggressor here is actually Alice; CLS is...
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Unitary Patent Over-simplified By IoS
The IoS may have uncritically picked up the messaging the UK’s “Intellectual Property Office” has been spreading, but the likely outcome of the unitary patent is likely to be much less savoury. Rather...
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Speak Up For SHIELD
If you’re a US citizen, your support for the bipartisan SHIELD Act could strike a decisive blow to patent trolls by making them pay costs if they lose patent actions and allowing judges to require a...
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Google, VP8 and Codec Standards
The politics around codecs are complex and the incumbents are prone to deceptive feints, like in 2010 when MPEG-LA claimed that H.264 was available “free” for web uses (but content owners probably...
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Nokia Attacks
I remain bemused by Nokia’s attack on the prospects of the VP8 video format becoming an open standard. I can’t see what they & their shareholders get as a benefit, but I can see the harm it does to...
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On Joining OIN
I signed up Meshed Insights as an OIN licensee, and was amazed when I told people how few people knew it existed. That was the origin of this week’s InfoWorld column. I realise OIN doesn’t fix...
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Don’t Stop With The Trolls
My article in InfoWorld this week rounded up the news of the White House initiative to deal with patent trolls and repeated some proposals I’ve made before on other reforms we could make to relieve...
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OSI, FSF and the end of software patents
Just as we did in the case of CPTN’s threatened acquisition of Novell’s patent portfolio in 2011, the OSI and FSF have once again collaborated to file a briefing — this time in the key software patent...
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Azure Loves Linux; What About Microsoft?
The news that Red Hat and Microsoft have reached an agreement about hosting Linux is very welcome. I am delighted for Red Hat here, and see this as a huge sign of the continuing power and growth of...
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Joining A Community Means Accepting Its Norms
The progress of Microsoft towards acceptance into the open source community continues. The Azure team is definitely a force for good in the company, constantly pushing Microsoft’s developer teams to...
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