Symbian's Patently Terrible “Triumph”
Although I've written elsewhere about the recent court case of Symbian v Comptroller General of Patents, noting that it was bad news, I hadn't realised quite how bad the news was until I went through the complete judgment. It's plain that the judges in question, who to their credit tried their level best to understand this mysterious stuff called software, failed to grasp the central issue of what software is. As a result, they have passed down a judgment that is so seriously wrong it will cause a huge amount of damage in the future unless it is revoked by a higher court....
On Open Enterprise blog.
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2 comments:
It's a disaster - and baffling in view of the way things seemed to be going after earlier Court decisions and comments by e.g. Lord Justice Jacob. I don't think the judges necessarily failed to grasp the issue (and on the other hand I'm very sceptical of the view of the UKIPO as a champion of rational patent policy), but this has come as a nasty surprise. According to OSS Watch, http://xrl.us/otkry leave to appeal has been denied. Perhaps most disappointing of all (though regrettably I'm not surprised) is the apparent apathy here in the UK: FFII.org.uk (dead), OpenRightsGroup.org (silent) etc.
I think the unexpected nature is down to the fact that there is *no* consistent logic to be had in the realm of software patents: they are inherently random.
ORG are probably a bit busy with the thousands of other problems we are facing....
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