http://eupat.ffii.org European Patent News en 2010-05-14 http://eupat.ffii.org/10/05/eba The Enlarged Board of Appeals at the European Patent Office (EPO) has finally delivered its opinion on the questions of the President filed under G3/08 regarding Software Patents. The most important conclusion of the Board is that now, as “legal development meets its limits, it is time for the legislator to take over” (p. 17 of the opinion). 2010-05-06 http://eupat.ffii.org/10/05/knowright A Conference in Vienna in which FFII participated alongside with academics and EU policymakers, current trends toward strangling of software innovation by means of an ever-more burdensome legal environment drew attention. EU Patent Court expected this year, Lisbon treaty ensures that parliaments have no say. 2010-05-04 http://eupat.ffii.org/10/05/redhat Bad software patents are those software patents that meet today's bad statutory requirements. 2010-04-06 http://eupat.ffii.org/10/03/ibm IBM is citing 106 US patents to prevent French company TurboHercules from offering an opensource emulator that would allow people to use certain IBM software without buying the mainframe computer to which it is tied. 2010-03-25 http://eupat.ffii.org/10/03/tridgell 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. 2010-03-17 http://eupat.ffii.org/10/03/inventor 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. 2010-03-15 http://eupat.ffii.org/05/10/eucn 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. 2010-03-13 http://eupat.ffii.org/10/03/bessen/sig Here we try to give an overview of our work on EUPAT in March 2010. 2010-03-13 http://eupat.ffii.org/10/03/bessen 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. 2010-03-06 http://eupat.ffii.org/10/03/quinn 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".