8mo ago

US Senate To Revive Software Patents With PERA Bill Vote On Thursday

news.intellectia.ai

US Senate To Revive Software Patents With PERA Bill Vote On Thursday - Intellectia News

The EFF is urging people to contact their legislators now, before the vote.

https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-we-can-t-afford-more-bad-patents

10 comments

The U.S destroying its own economy. Who could've asked for a better Christmas present? With Trump at the helm next year, it's only a question of time before trade partners tell the U.S to fuck off and they stop ignoring decisions like these.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Maybe I should patent breathing
- Eh ehm- before that, I'd encourage you to remove the words from your comment, I have patented writing
  
  Ah, but you my friend are at risk of infringing on my patent. I've patented the alphabet.
Could someone point me to a more in-depth legal analysis of this bill? The text of it is here. It looks to me like it is mostly about replacing vague parts of the U.S. code with regards to patents with more explicit instructions, and one of these instructions even seems to give courts explicit permission to judge whether an invention is eligible for a patent rather than taking this power away:
IN GENERAL.—In an action brought for infringement under this title, the court, at any time, may determine whether an invention or discovery that is a subject of the action is eligible for a patent under this section, including on motion of a party when there are no genuine issues of material fact.
Furthermore, one really nice thing that this bill does is that it makes it clear that if the invention or discovery solely involves a process or material occurring naturally with no modification--a human gene being explicitly called out--then it is explicitly ineligible for a patent.
To be clear, though, I am not a legal expert, which is why it would be great if someone would provide an in-depth analysis of exactly where the problem is rather than just saying that the bill is bad.
- You might start with the documents posted to the EFF site over the past year. For example, the September opposition letters include specific court decisions and put them in context, including commentary from law professors.
  https://www.eff.org/search/site/pera
Patent trolls are one thing, but I bet Amazon and Google are waiting with their finger on the submit button for "gimme monopoly rights"
Why is a .ai link the source instead of EFF
- It's re-posted from a news community, where it was since removed for not being from an acceptable news site. Unfortunately, the acceptable news sites covered this more than 30 days ago, which disqualifies their articles regardless of whether they were ever posted to the community. sigh
  I couldn't find a better article in the time I had to spare, so I re-posted this one. I think what's important in this case is just that word gets out. I don't see anything misleading about this one, and the EFF link (which is also not exactly a news site) is plainly visible.

10 comments