Charles Leadbeater, journalist from the Financial Times talks about real innovation and how the image of inventors is bad for development on TED-talks.
Charles argues that innovation comes from consumers and its up to companies to listening to and understand consumers.
In a Swedish bill, communication profiles, aka sociograms or traffic data, will give authorities a new lead into investigations. While politicians argue that no personal data will be recorded outside particular narrow investigations, "traffic data" is not considered personal data as such.
From a C-Net interview with Horacio Gutierrez, IPR-lawyer at Microsoft, its clear that patent insurance still is the game to curb competition. Even though Microsoft is paying ten times its patent income in patent charges, trials and fees, it manages to find profit in the larger loss and risk for all. The idea is to sell an insurance against patent risk called patent indemnification to partners. Selling patent indemnification covers patents and patent lobbying costs by creating new alliances and effectively kills independent actors. Its just what Bill Gates concluded in the early days of Microsoft:
Special patent courts should have a more general court watching in the interest of a more balanced interpretation. But proponents of a new European patent court seem eager to stand clear of any oversight, arguing that it would only cause economic harm. I disagree.Run down: 2008: 73 -> 113 -> 14 -> 5 2007: 100 -> 68->18->8 2006: 77 -> 45->12->8 2005: 62 -> 63->4->4 2004: 42 -> 35->15->11 So the risk of a ECJ appeal is about 5-10% in trademarks. Is that such a terrible risk in comparison with the cost of patent inflation?
om the European patent office...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-kahin/the-patent-bubble-still-g_b_129232.htmlhttp://www.iptegrity.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=173&Itemid=9Summary of important amendments in 2003-07-24:
"The key amendments in this regard were Amendment 166 to the Harbour report and Amendment 138 to the Trautmann report, which were both carried. They state that users' access may not be restricted in any way that infringes their fundamental rights, and (166) that any sanctions should be proportionate and (138) require a court order. They both
reinforce the principle established on April 9th in the Bono report, that the Parliament is against cutting off people's Internet access as a sanction for copyright infringement. Cutting off Internet access was not explicitly in the Telecoms Package, but it did open the door to 3-strikes. These amendments close that door. "
PR: September 24 Is World Day Against Software Patents Brussels, 2nd September 2008 -- A global coalition of more than 80 software companies, associations and developers has declared the 24th of September to be the "World Day Against Software Patents". Five years ago, on 24 September 2003, the European Parliament adopted amendments to limit the scope of patent law and thereby protect small software companies from the harmful effects of broad and trivial software patents. A global petition asking to effectively stop software patents worldwide will be launched on 24 September 2008, together with specific additional requests for certain regions such as Europe, the UnitedStates or India. More at: http://stopsoftwarepatents.org/ FFII PR at: https://press.ffii.org/Press_releases/September_24_Is_World_Day_Against_Software_Patents
BBC reports that Canada-based Innovation Partnership, a non-profit consultancy, states in a newly released report that "`Blocking patents' are delaying advances in cancer medicine and food crops" and that "the full benefits of synthetic biology and nanotechnology will not be realised without urgent reforms to encourage sharing of information".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7632318.stm
the full report is available (pdf, CC-license) at
http://www.theinnovationpartnership.org/en/ieg/report/
UPDATE:Don't miss this presentation:
"The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives."
Professor Michael Heller visits Google to discuss his book.
