Free Software Business¶

Software Patents¶

It seems like not a week can pass without companies throwing (software) patents at each other. This week the mobile phone business is (again) a real patent battlefield with basically everyone suing basically everyone and their dog. What's even more worrying is that one explanation why this is happening is to force a higher price tag on the Free Sofware-based mobile OS that is Android/Linux. Now if this isn't balant abuse of patent law, I don't know what is! Check the last two links in the list below for a graphical overview of the whole mobile OS patent massacre.

This is big: the US Department of Justice and the German Federal Competition Office have allowed CPTN Holdings (consortium consisting of Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and EMC) to acquire Novell's highly seeked after patent portfolio only under terms that would protect Free Software from these patents. The most important bit is that the decision was made expressively to protect Free Software development and innovation and to protect those CPTN (members) may only acquire patent licenses to those patents, while the cca. 882 patents in question themselves will have to be released under the GPLv2 license and the OIN license. I'm proud to say FSFE helped achieve this (together with FSF, OSI and others) :]

Incidentially, media reports how OIN is growing fast and mentions its latest aditions.

Incidentially incidentially, Microsoft due to its i4i patent battle, is fighting for lower burden of proof to invalidate patents. This was certainly a lively and fun week from the (software) patent perspective.

Copyright and Other Legal Act Reforms¶

IPtegrity.com: DE Act court ruling – a twisted balance

KEI Online: Notes from April 13, 2011 EBU/TACD/IFLA, EDA event at European Parliament on WIPO treaty for the blind

Christian Engström: 40+ MEPs request review of copyright extension

Ariel Katz: the iPod Tax, the iTunes Tax and the Notepad Tax [in Canada]

This week was particularly bad for supporters of the so called "three strikes" copyright laws, as they took beating from several parts of the EU. The biggest of all perhaps by the European Court of Justice's Advocat General – if the ECJ were to follow his opinion (which is more often the case then not), it might become legally impossible to have any filtering and/or three-strikes system in the EU.