Atlanteknology - Technology News for Atlantic Canada

No Patents for Software in Europe

In a surprise move, the European Commission said recently that computer programmes will be excluded from patentability in the upcoming EU patent legislation and that the European Patent Office will be bound by this law. This statement appears to contradict one made by the European Commission last year, when it said that the EU would continue to grant software patents that make a technical contribution, despite the European Parliament's decision to reject the software patent directive.

The nuts and bolts (and dollars) of inventions

Tom Boyd is one of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office's (CIPO) representatives here in the Atlantic region. I was reading some of the feeds I get from various sources and noted a new article on CIPO's website which I thought was an excellent overview of the process a person should go through after they have had some sort of  brainstorm and created something interesting. I will leave it to you to read the article. I recommend it to you. It could save you some time and perhaps more importantly, some money.

Patent Auctions

I read an interesting article in the February 13, 2006 issue of Business Week.  A gentleman by the name of Dean Becker has, in my opinion, a brilliant idea - selling patents via auction.  This April, Ocean Tomo will have its first auction at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco where it will sell off rights to everything from earth imaging technology to shrink wrap.  As Mr. Becker correctly notes in the article, patents, patent licensing, and patent selling have traditionally been high priced and often arduous endeavours. 

Not so for Ocean Tomo's patent auction it seems. So far, according to the article, more than 1,200 patents have been submitted to Ocean Tomo for sale from such companies as AT&T, Bell South, American Express, and Kimberly Clarke.  Also up for sale are 48 patents filed by one William L. Rebber, an engineer formerly with Walt Disney Co. and Motorola Inc.

I do not know whether this concept will succeed but I certainly hope that it does.  The original intent of patent law was to give inventors certain rights over their invention in exchange for divulging the facts of the invention to the world.  However, in today's business climate, patents have become a tool and a weapon used by large corporations to intimidate and block their competitors.  Perhaps this auction process will assist the public (in its broadest sense) in regaining some of the balance.  Hopefully it will also encourage individuals (as opposed to corporations) to go through the process of patenting things that they have invented but have felt too scared to do anything with.

US Biotech Patent Cases in Trouble

More than 100 biotech patent applications -- part of a land rush to protect bits of identifiable genetic markers -- will most likely be thrown out as inventions lacking practical use, as a result of a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

The Monsanto Co. case, closely watched by the biotechnology industry, is the court's first application of the patent protection standard of "substantial and specific" utility to nucleotide sequences known as expressed sequence tags, or ESTs -- a component of DNA.

For those companies in this very particular field, it has got to be a bit of a setback. Monsanto alone had more than 650,000 ESTs identified that could have been subject to patent protection according to the article.
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