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Patents

German High Court Declares All Software Patentable 330

Posted by StoneLion from the bitter-patent-medicine dept.
FlorianMueller writes "Long gone are the times when Europe was that bastion of resistance against software patents and patents on such things as file systems were ruled invalid. In a decision published today, the Federal Court of Justice of Germany upheld a patent on the automatic generation of structured documents (such as XML/HTML) in a client-server setting. The ruling lays out general principles that go beyond the patent at stake: they tear down all barriers to software patentability in the largest EU member state, even though a European patent treaty has been adopted that was intended to exclude software from the scope of patentable subject matter. EU patent examiners recently warned against a drift toward software patents. Software patent critics in Europe fear this will spark more litigation on their continent and increasingly call for defensive measures."
Government

EU Patent Examiners Warn Parliament Will Have "No Power" 99

Posted by kdawson from the abdication-by-another-name dept.
zoobab writes "The Staff Union of the European Patent Organisation sent a letter to the President of the European Parliament, warning that after the EU accedes to the European Patent Convention, there is a risk that the European Parliament would be 'circumvented' as a legislator. The European Patent Organisation is in no way a model of democracy: national patent offices are in power, there is no parliament involved in the decision-making process, and diplomatic conferences are held behind closed doors. There are plans to create a central patent court in Europe, which would operate in a democratic vacuum, not counterbalanced by any legislative assembly, in particular not the European Parliament. Such a central patent court could also validate software patents via caselaw (as the German Supreme Court recently did with the Microsoft FAT patent). And Microsoft, IBM, and SAP are lobbying in Brussels not to reopen consideration of the software patent directive."
The Internet

The Telcos' Secret Anti-Net Neutrality Strategy 457

Posted by kdawson from the net-brutality dept.
NoMoreHelio writes "The political blog ThinkProgress lays out big telecom's plan to attack net neutality. The blog obtained a secret PowerPoint presentation from a telecommunications industry front group (PPT) that outlines the industry strategy for defending against regulatory attempts by the FCC. The industry plans to partner with two conservative 'astroturfing' groups, best known for their work seeding the Tea Party movement. Today's revelation from ThinkProgress comes as Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) joined various telecom-funded front groups to unveil an anti-net neutrality bill."

Submission + - "No Power for the Parliament" warns EPO examiners 2

Submitted by zoobab
zoobab writes: The Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO) sent a letter to the President of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, warning of risks for the European Parliament to be "circumvented" as a legislator when the EU will accede to the European Patent Convention (EPC). The European Patent Organisation is everything except a model of democracy: national patent offices are in power, there is no parliament involved in the decision making process, and diplomatic conferences are held behind closed doors. There are plans to create a central patent court in Europe, which would operate in a democratic vacuum, as it would not be counterbalanced by any legislative assembly, let alone the European Parliament. Such central patent court could also validate software patents via caselaw (as it was recently done with the Microsoft FAT patent by the German Supreme Court), and Microsoft, IBM or SAP are lobbying in Brussels not to reopen the software patent directive.
Google

Amazon, MS, and Yahoo Against Google's Library 144

Posted by samzenpus from the many-against-one dept.
anonymousNR writes "From the BBC, 'Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google's attempt to create what could be the world's largest virtual library. Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive. They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works. "Google is trying to monopolise the library system," the Internet Archive's founder Brewster Kahle said.'"
Media

Pirate Party Coming To Canada 394

Posted by timothy from the but-the-vikings-hit-canada-hundreds-of-years-ago dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After scoring a surprise electoral win in Sweden and getting high-profile support in Germany, The Pirate Party is coming to Canada. The party's goals are fairly simple. People should have the right to share and copy music, movies and virtually any material, as long as it is for personal use, not for profit. It opposes government and corporate monitoring of Internet activities, unless as part of a criminal investigation. It also wants to phase out patents."
Red Hat Software

Fedora 11 Is Now Available 195

Posted by timothy from the one-louder dept.
rexx mainframe writes "Fedora 11 is now available on BitTorrent. Fedora 11 offers ext4, a 20-second startup, and the latest GNOME, KDE and XFCE releases. Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3's latest pre-releases are available as well. Fedora 11 features Presto, a yum plugin that reduces bandwidth consumption drastically by downloading only binary differences between updates. It also features Openchange for interoperability with Microsoft Exchange. There are new security enhancements, improved and upgraded development tools, and cutting-edge features in areas such as virtualization."
Space

One Fifth of World's Population Can't See Milky Way At Night 612

Posted by timothy from the 80-20-rule dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Cosmos Magazine: "Light pollution has caused one-fifth of the world's population — mostly in Europe, Britain and the US — to lose their ability to see the Milky Way in the night sky. 'The arc of the Milky Way seen from a truly dark location is part of our planet's natural heritage,' said Connie Walker, and astronomer from the US National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. Yet 'more than one fifth of the world population, two thirds of the US population and one half of the European Union population have already lost naked eye visibility of the Milky Way.'"
PC Games (Games)

A Case Study of RMTs In EVE Online 81

Posted by Soulskill from the to-post-a-comment-please-deposit-eight-cents dept.
Kheldon writes with an article at MMO Gamer which explores how well real money transactions work in online games, using EVE Online as a test case. Quoting: "... My next problem came from trying to sell the [Game Time cards] through the 'Time Code Bazaar' on the forums. While I quickly found buyers, none of them actually went through with the deal. This is the inherent problem with developer sanctioned RMT. Unless true, unfettered, player-to-player transactions are allowed without developer 'regulation,' the market will inevitably be operating inefficiently. Consider gold-farmers for a moment. Setting aside the moral or legal aspects of the trade, and considering from a purely economic standpoint, gold-farmers are the RMT equivalent of large corporations. They operate on the concept of 'economies-of-scale,' which basically means that up to a certain point, the larger a company is, the cheaper they can produce that product. Of course, companies that can produce a product more cheaply can undercut the competition while maintaining the same profit margin; meaning they'll make more sales, giving them more overall profit, and supporting the corporate growth, which furthers the economy of scale. This is the market at its most pure."
Security

Paris Hosts the Second Hacker Space Festival 55

Posted by kdawson from the cette-annee-a-paris dept.
zoobab writes "Hackers from all over Europe will meet at the end of the month (27-30 June) at the second Hacker Space Festival in Paris. The four-day schedule includes conferences and workshops on: Metasploit, HostileWRT, FPGA for beginners, ICT disaster recovery, software patents in Europe, Hadopi, and many other topics. The future of Hacker Spaces will also be debated. The event will be hosted by the first French hackerspace, /tmp/lab, located in an industrial zone on the outskirts of Paris."

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