patent policy

If you follow patents in the tech world, a good site to watch is LatestPatents.com, which highlights a few big tech companies, listing out the number of patent applications published each week and patents granted each week.

What always strikes me is the differences in numbers between the companies.

Tony was the first of a bunch of you to send over the news that President Obama's top advisor, David Plouffe, has put up a blog post providing a preliminary overview of what he "heard" via the Ask the Advisor question, which we wrote about last week, concerning "obstacles to innovation." The only indication that responses like mine were read was a

Linux Magazine: "Ubuntu has introduced a new Patent Policy to help developers and rights holders deal with software patent issues."

Groklaw: "Basically I remain convinced that the patent policy most fair and most suitable for the world will regard mathematical ideas (such as algorithms) to be not subject to proprietary patent rights."