A year ago today, the Gowers Review was released to the public. The Government accepted all of the 54 recommendations it made, and experts welcomed the balanced approach it took to intellectual property law in the digital age, since it matched greater flexibility with tougher measures on enforcement (although at the time, we flagged its [...]

Read the rest of "Happy birthday Gowers - but where are our reforms?"

The resounding message of the Olswang’s and Greenberg Traurig’s Friday Open Source Summit (PDF) was that software patents are bad for business. Bruce Perens’s message against software patents and that the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA) should not become a reality was echoed throughout the day by numerous speakers to be restated once again during [...]

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It’s time to get in touch with your MEP again.
IPRED2 – the EU’s second intellectual property enforcement directive – is going to the vote at the EU Parliament next week. If it passes in its current form, “aiding, abetting, or inciting” copyright infringement on a “commercial scale” in the EU will become a crime. What’s [...]

Read the rest of "Take action: European Parliament votes on IPRED2 next week"

IPRED2, the European Union’s second intellectual property enforcement directive, is going to the vote at the end of this month. The European Parliament’s committee on legal affairs, JURI, will be voting on several amendments to this mammoth bill which threaten to turn IP infringement from a civil offence into a criminal one. Your MEP needs [...]

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The Gowers Review, commissioned by the government to look at intellectual property law in the United Kingdom, published its final report today. It was commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown MP so it is expected that the report will hold a lot of weight and that its recommendations will be followed. We [...]

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The Court of Appeal has ruled on two cases involving software patents today. It rejected one and unfortunately granted the other. It was hoped that the ruling would confirm that software development which relates only to new business logic does not have to worry about patent threats. As more and more companies in the United [...]

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The European Patent Litigation Agreement (blogged by us as Software Patents - back like a bad smell) remains on course to pass the European Parliament (EP) with a comfortable majority. Although the proposed legislation will not by itself bring Software Patents into our legal system, as it stands the legislation gives powers to the European [...]

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More than a year has passed since the European Parliament’s historic rejection of the Commission’s and Council’s software patent bill. Now this zombie legislation is shambling through parliament again: on October 11 or 12, the EP is set to vote in Brussels on two competing motions for a resolution on future European patent policy. Next [...]

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The European Commission has been consulting on the future of Europe’s patent regime and, as always, the FFII have been doing a good job of monitoring their progress. Fears that this was a third attempt to legalise software patents in Europe prompted a large number of SMEs, software developers and bigger IT firms to respond, [...]

Read the rest of "Commission Cheats European SMEs in Patent Consultation"