“In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
August 17, 2007 at 5.25 pm
· Filed under Software patents 
The Patently-O blog conducted an informal survey by asking its readers “Overall, has your company made money from the patent system?”
On the software side, more companies describe themselves as “losing money” rather than “making money” from patents.
Not surprisingly, pharma companies see the opposite.
August 14, 2007 at 6.09 pm
· Filed under IP
Judge Rules Novell Owns Key Software
This is part of my series “valuation of so-called intellectual property is much less than you may think” (at least, if you’re not one of my regular readers).
SCO was claiming “intellectual property” over UNIX software.
A federal judge rules otherwise.
In the middle of the day, SCO’s share was losing 72% hitting an all-time low of 0,35 $ a share, with volumes never seen before.
This is what you should be prepared for if you’re claiming your company is making money out of software “intellectual property”…
You may remember that Broadcom claims Qualcomm is infringing some of its patents, and thus got a ban on Qualcomm patents based cell phone chips.
On the other side, Qualcomm kept secret it was holding video compression patents during the H.264 standardization phase, and then tried to blackmail make money from it. However Qualcomm was found guilty of “patent ambush”.
Qualcomm apologized (but will appeal).
The lesson ? Qualcomm gonna have a hard time enforcing its patent, which is perfectly good under US laws until proven otherwise. This once again calls into question the valuation of a patent…
August 10, 2007 at 11.41 am
· Filed under QOTD
“If location [of R&D] was determined by cost, Silicon Valley would be empty.”
“[strategic planning] is important (…). But doing that thing well—execution—is what sets companies apart. Every football play is designed to go for a huge gain. The reason it doesn’t is because of execution—people drop balls, miss blocks, go to the wrong place, and so forth.”
August 8, 2007 at 2.19 pm
· Filed under IP
Ruling Goes Against Qualcomm In Its Broadcom Patent Dispute.
There’s a ban going on preventing import in the US of cell phones based on some Qualcomm 3G patents.
This is a power-saving (software) related patent, by the way.
In some sense, Qualcomm, who is by no way stranger to patent wars, only reap the whirlwind it helped sewed.
But frankly, I find hard to distinguish between alleged “IP” (legally enforced monopoly) protection and plain archaic protectionism in that case. US consumers won’t be able to get access to world top-class cell phones, while the so-called “broadband” access they get is already notoriously lagging behind that of Europe and Asia (more on this, and the OECD full report). And I don’t mention IPTV. The US brought the Internet to the world, but one may wonder what role this IP obsession is playing in the rather slow rythm of telecommunications technology penetration there.
Je viens de lire l’analyse de l’AFDEL sur le marché de l’édition logicielle en France.
Quoi que l’étude soit intéressante, il me semble que l’absence de comparaison avec l’open source brille par son absence.
Un client est en effet souvent face au choix soit d’acheter un progiciel, soit de demander à un intégrateur d’adapter un logiciel open source, ce qui ne génère pas de cash flow associé à des licences et/ou de la maintenance. Autrement dit, l’open source a pour effet de déplacer des budgets de l’édition de logiciel vers le service. Ceci est particulièrement vrai sur les marchés publics, où l’open source effectue une montée en force continuelle depuis quelques années.
Dans ces conditions, essayer d’analyser le marché sous le seul angle de la pure édition de logiciel semble un exercice pour le moins spécieux, en surestimant la part de l’édition de logiciel dans le marché informatique global.
Il est regrettable de miner ainsi la crédibilité d’une étude qui est par ailleurs un travail fort sérieux de consolidation de données brutes…
Joff Wild wrote in the (excellent) IAM blog that he thought people having fought against the european CII directive, and software patents in Europe in general, were wrong, even if “many of them run companies too”.
I am one of them, and I’d like to shed some light on the debate by exploring the differences between the usual defenders and adversaries of software patents.
June 18, 2007 at 5.01 pm
· Filed under French politics
I once questionned how life would look like with both mandates of the President and the Prime Minister in the hands of only one almost married couple.
They’ve lost elections, but they lost more: Ségolène Royal and François Hollande broke up.
Whatever the (private) reasons behind this, they’re both professional politicians, so beyond the good reasons, it’s difficult not to think the real reason is that their relationship couldn’t stand their careers.
Whatever one may think from a political point of view, it’s always a sad thing when a love story comes to an end, especially since they got four children together.
Even in politics, the french way is always a story of the heart…
Wired ran a half-serious, half-fun readers’ contest to find ways to fix the “broken patent system” (their words, not mine). Here are the results.
There are some jewels among more mundane ideas. The separation between innovation and patents was outlined. There’s the idea that a patent should cost a recurring fee to its holder (”use it or lose it”), something I believe deeply in the field of copyright, but don’t think could work for patents.
However there’s one sentence that I think is so true that it can’t be repeated often enough, especially when talking with those European commissioners that are still mistaking patents for innovation: With little innovation, we are competing on the basis of labor cost.
