Brussels, 13 May 2008 — European Commissioner McCreevy is pushing for a bilateral patent treaty with the United States. This Tuesday 13 May in Brussels, White House and European representatives will try to adopt a tight roadmap for the signature of a EU-US patent treaty by the end of the year. Parts of the proposed treaty will contain provision on software patents, and could legalise them on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Talks in the Transatlantic Economic Council (TEC) are the current push for software patents. The US want to eliminate the higher standards of the European Patent Convention. The bilateral agenda is dictated by multinationals gathered in the Transatlantic Economic Business Dialogue (TABD). When you have a look who is in the Executive Board of the TABD, you find not a single European SME in there”, says Benjamin Henrion, a Brussels based patent policy specialist.

TEC which comprises EU and US high level representatives put a substantive harmonisation of patent law on its agenda. Substantive patent law covers what is patentable or not. The attempt to impose the low US standards on Europe via the Substantive Patent Law Treaty (SPLT) process utterly failed at the World Intellectual Property Organisation. Also progress in the WIPO B subgroup (without developing nations) could not be reached. Now the TEC is used as a new forum to push forward with lowering patentability standards through the back door. The TEC is a closed process, and sits outside the WIPO multilateral treaty talks. Since WIPO participants Brazil, India, and China began to fight EU-US proposals for ever more aggressive patents, the EU and US have begun their own bilateral talks.

The main difference is that the TEC is a trade process. The use of free trade talks to change patent laws has precedence. In the GATT negotiations the United States diverted a Free Trade process to blackmail trade partners to accept the TRIPs treaty that limited flexibilities of their national patent law.

OpenCourseWare is an idea - and an ideal - developed by the MIT faculty who share the Institute’s mission to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship to best serve the world. In 1999, the Faculty considered how to use the Internet in pursuit of this goal, and in 2000 proposed OCW. MIT published the first proof-of-concept site in 2002, containing 50 courses. By November 2007, MIT completed the initial publication of virtually the entire curriculum, over 1,800 courses in 33 academic disciplines. Going forward, the OCW team is updating existing courses and adding new content and services to the site.

The Internet Archive, a project to create a digital library of the web for posterity, successfully fought a secret government Patriot Act order for records about one of its patrons and won the right to make the order public, civil liberties groups announced Wednesday morning.

On November 26, 2007, the FBI served a controversial National Security Letter .pdf on the Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle, asking for records about one of the library’s registered users, asking for the user’s name, address and activity on the site.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive’s lawyers, fought the NSL, challenging its constitutionality in a December 14 complaint .pdf to a federal court in San Francisco. The FBI agreed on April 21 to withdraw the letter and unseal the court case, making some of the documents available to the public.

I have no idea what pressures Negroponte is under. I have no idea what failures of leadership, vision, or courage have occurred, are occurring, or are at risk of occurring at the OLPC project today. It would be irresponsible to jump to too many conclusions based on a single article. But if OLPC abandons its open source roots, then I do not see the project accomplishing any of its goals. And while I can afford to throw away the three XO laptops I bought, the world cannot afford to throw away the goal of ending poverty in favor of preserving monopoly control of technology.

April 23, 2008 (Computerworld) One day after the resignation of the One Laptop Per Child’s president was publicly revealed, the educational project’s founder and chairman said the group’s XO laptop may evolve to use only Windows XP as the operating system, with open-source educational apps such as its home-built Sugar running on top.

OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte also told The Associated Press on Tuesday that an insistence upon using only free, open-source software had hampered the XO’s usability and scared away potential adopters.

For instance, the Sugar graphical user interface aimed at children “grew amorphously” and “didn’t have a software architect who did it in a crisp way,” he said. Also, the laptops do not support the latest versions of Flash animation, which is widely used on children’s and educational Web sites.

“There are several examples like that, that we have to address without worrying about the fundamentalism in some of the open-source community,” he said. “One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist.”

Boeing Patent Shuts Down AMC-14 Lunar Flyby Salvage Attempt

However, SpaceDaily has now learned that a plan to salvage AMC-14 was abandoned a week ago when SES gave up in the face of patent issues relating to the lunar flyby process used to bring wayward GEO birds back to GEO Earth orbit.

Sources have told SpaceDaily that it was possible to bring AMC-14 back via the moon to a stable GEO orbit where the high powered satellite would have been able to operate for at four years and probably longer.

In the face of unrelated legal battles between the current patent owner Boeing and the satellite’s owner SES Americom - any efforts to salvage AMC-14 have been cast aside.

Primarily this is because SES is currently suing Boeing for an unrelated New Skies matter in the order of $50 million dollars - and Boeing told SES that the patent was only available if SES Americom dropped the lawsuit.

So there is quite a lot at stake, and the tide appears to be turning away from the profligate issuing of patents in such categories. At least the right questions are being asked. But to what extent will they reach a decision to modify or pull back? This case will help to decide. Of course, the Supreme Court is higher than this court, but having already given some direction, the Bilski case gives the appeals court the opportunity to undo what many view as damage by some decisions that opened the floodgates to all kinds of crazy patents. And that is why suddenly a large crowd of interested parties are submitting amicus briefs. The list at the court is impressive. Unfortunately, the court does not make the briefs digitally available, but Red Hat’s announcement says it will be on that page soon. And thankfully, Patently-O provides some descriptions of positions taken and explains the process.

In re Bilski is an appellate court case that provides an opportunity to eliminate business method patents and curtail efforts to claim monopolies on basic human skills, behaviors, and interactions. Bilski is challenging the rejection of his application for a patent on a method of managing the risk of bad weather through commodities trading. EFF submitted an amicus brief (in conjunction with The Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley Law, Public Knowledge, and Consumers Union) supporting the rejection of Bilski’s patent application and setting forth a framework for determining patentable subject matter that focuses on the use of technology in the claimed invention.

“The court must ensure that any test it uses in determining whether to award a patent is in line with the Constitution,” said Christopher Hansen, senior staff attorney with the ACLU First Amendment Working Group, who filed the brief. “If the government had the authority to grant exclusive rights to an idea, the fundamental purpose of the First Amendment - to protect an individual’s right to thought and expression - would be rendered meaningless.”

Today, Red Hat took a public stand challenging the standards for patenting software. In the Biliski case that is now before the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, this patent issue is ripe for consideration. In a friend of the court brief submitted to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in the Bilski case today, Red Hat describes the special problems that patents pose for open source and seeks modification of the standards for patentable subject matter that take open source into account. Here is a quick summary of our brief.

Open source software is one of the most dynamic, innovative sectors of the U.S. economy, but the U.S. patent system is a costly hindrance to open source innovation. We believe that although the patent system was created to foster innovation, it’s simply not an engine for innovation for open source. Software patents were barely recognized when open source began, and so the hope of obtaining a patent did not motivate the first developers. Those pioneers were generally opposed to software patents. The open, collaborative activity at the heart of open source is at odds with the patent system, which excludes the public from making, using or selling a patented invention. Open source developers seek to contribute code to the community – not to exclude others from using the code.