Planet FFII

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/04/01/microsoft-appeal-i4i.html

Alex Brown, the convener of the 2008 Ballot Resolution Meeting, on the status of the MS-OOXML standard (ISO/IEC 29500) and how Microsoft has lived up to its commitments. I guess no-one here is surprised (also Brown genuinely is, it seems), that things do not look well:
http://www.adjb.net/post/Microsoft-Fails-the-Standards-Test.aspx

"Danish expert and BRM delegate Jesper Lund Stocholm, running an analysis of Office 2010 files wrote: “It has been the fear of many that Microsoft will never, ever care at all about the strict conformance clause of ISO/IEC 29500, and my tests clearly [are] a sign that they were right.”"

"Most worrying of all, it appears than Ecma have ceased any proactive attempt to improve the text, leaving just a handful of national experts wrestling with this activity. It seems to me that Microsoft/Ecma believe 95% of the work has been done to ensure the standard is “useful and relevant”. Looking at the text, I reckon it is more like 95% that remains to be done, as it is still lousy with defects."

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/thumbs-down-for-software-patents-in-nz

“Under the Patents Act 1953, computer programs can be patented n New Zealand, provided they produce a commercially useful effect. […] [Some submitters] felt that computer software should be excluded from patent protection as software patents can stifle innovation and competition, and can be granted for trivial or existing techniques. In general we accept this position,” the committee says.

A Samba developer is teaching programmers some techniques of reading patent claims. However programmers should not be too confident that they can stay out of harmsway by applying these techniques. Patents are numerous and broad and, unlike the patentability restrictions of Art 52 EPC, meant to be real.

Each year the European Patent Office (EPO) and the European Commission celebrate the "European Inventor of the Year" Award. The EPO has published a number of video interviews with nominees, among them Peter Landrock, a pioneer in broad e-commerce patents and their application to infringment litigation in Europe.

The first meeting of the EU-China IP Working Group took place in Beijing on 18 October 2005. Mr. Luc Devigne headed the European side, which raised concerns about exemptions in the Chinese law that prevent European patent holders from individually collecting royalties for open standards. The revised Chinese patent law of 2009 contains more such exemptions.

Jim Bessen and colleagues found by statistical analysis that innovators are nowadays, unlike 20 years ago, losing more money by patent litigation than they are gaining from patent royalties. Bessen correlates these findings to changes in patent law which made the boundaries of patents more fuzzy.

In a speech given at a conference on research and innovation policy, the new Commissioner for Research and Innovation from Ireland, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, expressed a hope of "finally finding an agreement on the community patent", similar in tone to the hope of her colleague Barnier to "be the last Commissioner who tries to finalise a deal on the European patent".

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-03/apple-starts-nuclear-war-in-patent-fight-with-htc-update2-.html

The complete documents for the suit are available here:
http://gizmodo.com/5483632/apple-sues-htc-for-infringing-on-20-iphone-patents?skyline=true&s=i

Jonas Bosson comments in his blog on this topic:
http://bosson.blogspot.com/2010/03/apple-makes-war-with-silly-broad.html