Archive for the ‘Patents’ Category
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
Christopher Hansen, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, has become involved in a patent case for an "abstract idea". The patent in dispute belongs to Bernard L. Bilski:
"In 2006, Bilski sought a patent for his idea that the weather risk involved in buying and selling commodities could be ...
Posted in Patentability, Patents, IP | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
In 1999, between 1.3 and 2.1 billion people did not have access to essential medicines (around 30% of the world’s population), with most of these people being concentrated in Africa and India.[1] In May 2004, after pressure from Canadian civil society groups and Stephen Lewis (the UN Special Envoy on ...
Posted in Pharmaceutical Drugs, Cross Border Issues, Patents, IP | 3 Comments »
Monday, March 31st, 2008
During Professor Bruce Ziff’s discussion on Private Property, he referred to Garrett Hardin’s theory on the Tragedy of the Commons. The common hypothetical relates to the relationship of farmers overgrazing on common land. Since ...
Posted in Patents, IP | 1 Comment »
Friday, March 28th, 2008
Under Canadian patent law, the scope of patentable subject matter is still expanding. But under U.S. patent law, “anything under the sun made by man” is patentable. This has come to include patents for computer software.
Software patents raise a debate over which algorithms are novel, and which are non-obvious. Some ...
Posted in Commercialization, Originality, Technology, Patentability, IP, Patents, Copyright | No Comments »
Monday, March 17th, 2008
Issues surrounding medicine patents truly test the moral groundings of patent law. Specifically, when companies develop and patent drugs that treat life threatening diseases, the inherent morality behind restrictive patent laws seems to lose legitimacy. The objectives underlying intellectual property must be weighed against the immediate humanitarian agenda. The anti-patent ...
Posted in Pharmaceutical Drugs | 3 Comments »
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
I recently attended a lecture by professor Bruce Ziff, of the University of Alberta Law School, where he described what he termed as his only original academic idea. He posited that the reason we as a society are so restrictive about property rights is because it is basically impossible to ...
Posted in Technology, Infringement, Infringement, Digital Locks, Privacy, Copyright, IP, Patents, General | 1 Comment »
Sunday, March 2nd, 2008
Geographical Indicators are terms used to define names that are affixed to predominantly agricultural products (although GIs are also used for other products such as crafts and jewellery, this kind of use is less common) originating from specific geographical regions where these products are grown and manufactured and from which ...
Posted in Cross Border Issues, Trademarks, IP | 1 Comment »
Monday, November 19th, 2007
IBM is going to offer free programs to compete with Microsoft’s Office programs. A new attempt for some good old Microsoft-bashing, IBM failed in 1990 to compete head-on with its OS/2 system, and an ambitious plan to challenge one of the most lucrative businesses for Microsoft. The more important question ...
Posted in Open-Source, Technology, Patents, IP | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
In June 2007, the BBC reported, that scientists from the J. Craig Venter
Institute had applied to patent the method they plan to use to create
their synthetic organism. According to the article, the Institute is
claiming exclusive ownership of a set of 381 essential genes believed
necessary to keep an organism ...
Posted in Patentability, Patents, IP | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
In March 2007, the district court in Alexandria, Virginia held that
Vonage, a company which uses voice over IP technology, had infringed claims
of three patents owned by Verizon Communications, and that those patents were
not invalid as obvious. The judgement awarded $58,000,000 in damages and a
royalty of 5.5% on any future ...
Posted in Infringement, Patentability, Patents, IP | 1 Comment »
