patent system

In one of the many-pronged attack that Apple has been making on Android, it's scored a victory at the International Trade Commission, where it's been determined that the idea, that if you see a phone number in an email or on a web-page and click it to call the number, is so special and wonderful that only Apple could possibly use it.

Apple has been garnering quite a reputation for itself as a patent bully, for example using patents around the world in an attempt to stop Samsung competing in the tablet market, and

Matt writes in and summarizes the details of a ridiculous ruling perfectly below, so I'll let him takeover and chime in again at the end:

"On Friday, a Texas federal judge in the U.S.

District Court for the Eastern District of Texas issued an astonishing order. In essence, it fined InnoLux because its CEO stated his belief, in China, that the US sometimes over-enforces patents.

After the Supreme Court totally punted on the question of business model and software patents in the Bilski ruling, the courts have been a mixed bag.

Without a brightline rule, they're sort of fumbling around.

The state of universities and intellectual property is pretty messy these days. Thanks to the screwed up Bayh-Dole law, many universities feel (wrongly) compelled to patent the research that they produce.

This generally goes against their basic charters of sharing the knowledge that they create. It's also not very profitable.

Only a small handful of universities have been able to make money off of patents. Most have lost a ton of money, setting up expensive tech transfer offices that don't return a dime.

So, a couple of weeks ago, our submissions were slammed by a whole bunch of you with submission subjects along the lines of "Gizmodo is losing it" or "Gizmodo fails" or "Gizmodo doesn't get innovation" (all actual submissions). senshikaze got the first submission in, though, and so gets the credit.

From the summaries, it was clear that Gizmodo had published a pro-patent post, and specifically a pro-Apple patent post, written by Jesus Diaz.

With Congress and the President pretending that a bad patent reform bill is all about "creating jobs" even as there's little evidence that the reforms will actually do anything, Congress appears to be poised to approve the bill.

Of course, the bill does almost nothing to address the real problems of the patent system, but that won't stop the grandstanding.

This week's favorites post comes from Killer_Tofu whose name intrigues me, but I'm not sure I really want to know.

There was a somewhat horrifying article in the NY Times recently about some serious drug shortages in the US, especially for certain forms of cancer.

We recently wrote about a surprising Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruling that might open the door to invalidating a lot of software patents.