The Guardian newspaper reports that the European Commission in its dispute with Microsoft concerning anti-trust issues has ruled that the patent protection on Microsoft's protocols is not sufficiently innovative to justify charging for them.
The Commission has reported in a press release that it has issued a statement of objection concerning Microsoft's licensing programme. The press release is somewhat confusing since it talks about four of the 160 claims representing a limited degree of innovation but that the rest of the claims represent implementations of previous work. On the other hand the Commission suggests that the existence of patents represents some degree of innovation. Without a copy of the Statement of Objection it is probably not possible to understand exactly what was said. It would be a sad day if the Commission is somehow overuling the European Patent Office in deciding what is innovative and what is not innovative.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment