pieterh - Slashdot User

Submission + - A Generation of Software Patents (ssrn.com)

Submitted by

pieterh

on Thursday June 23, 2011 @11:42AM

pieterh writes: "Boston University's James Bessen has published a landmark study on a generation of software patents. Looking at almost 20 years of software patents, he finds "that most software firms still do not patent, most software patents are obtained by a few large firms in the software industry or in other industries, and the risk of litigation from software patents continues to increase dramatically. Given these findings, it is hard to conclude that software patents have provided a net social benefit in the software industry." Not that this surprises anyone actually innovating in software."

Submission + - Red Hat claims patent on SOAP over CGI? (digitalmajority.org) 1

Submitted by

WMGarrison

on Friday March 20, 2009 @05:53AM

WMGarrison writes: "US Patent 7453593 claims command-line processing by a web server of SOAP requests, resulting in XML responses, from and to a remote client. The HTTP Common Gateway Interface (CGI) operates precisely as described in Claim 1. If you POST a SOAP document and return an XHTML response or a SOAP document, this infringes on Claim 2, since both XHTML and SOAP are XML languages. This patent thus claims to own the processing of SOAP documents by CGI programs."

Submission + - Software patent war ignites again

Submitted by

pieterh

on Thursday September 21, 2006 @09:48AM

pieterh writes: "ZDNet UK has a detailed article on the heating-up of the software patent debate in Europe. A new motion before the European Parliament calls for a harmonised patent court (EPLA) that would be able to enforce software patents across Europe. This comes just 15 months after the EP rejected the infamous Computer Implemented Inventions directive. Meanwhile in the states, a new study proves that the software industry is not (yet) dead. Disclaimer: I am a programmer and I am against software patents."

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