|
The Software Freedom Law Center Blog.
|
All blogs at the Software Freedom Law Center.
|
-
The BlackBerry Emergency
Blog post by Mishi Choudhary. Please email any comments on this entry to <Mishi@softwarefreedom.org>.
According to the Government of India, private service providers like AirTel and Vodafone are failing in their legal obligations under the Information Technology Act, hastily
amended in the days immediately following the Mumbai 7/11 attacks, by not providing
access to the content of emails and texts sent to or from BlackBerry
users. As a lawyer, I have some doubt about this legal position, no
doubt under discussion between GoI and the service providers. But there is no
doubt that the Government has failed...
-
Software Patents Post Bilski: A Look Ahead
Blog post by Michael A. Spiegel. Please email any comments on this entry to <mspiegel@softwarefreedom.org>.
In
the haze of confusion surrounding the Supreme Court’s recent
decision in Bilski v. Kappos,
the appeals board of the United States Patent and Trademark Office
issued a ruling last week that
takes a definitive stand against the worst kinds of patents that
threaten software developers every day.
Despite
the Court's failure to
provide much guidance or adopt a bright-line test for patentable
subject matter in Bilski,
the appeals board ruling
in Ex parte Proudler is a sign of the growing skepticism
towards software patents that continually...
-
The 300th Anniversary of the Statute of Anne
Blog post by Laura Moy. Please email any comments on this entry to <Laura Moy@softwarefreedom.org>.
This weekend marks the 300th anniversary of the Statute of Anne, widely considered to be the foundation of modern copyright law. The Statute, formally titled “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning," is often praised for placing intellectual property rights in the hands of individual authors and ushering in the era of public interest copyright law. In reality, however, the law's most lasting legacy has been the misguided proposition that “the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books" cannot be...
-
Gene Patenting and Free Software: A Breakthrough
Blog post by Eben Moglen. Please email any comments on this entry to <eben@softwarefreedom.org>.
[Crossposted
from Opensource.com].
Last week, to the surprise of patent lawyers and the biotechnology industry, advocates for technological freedom won an enormous victory against socially harmful distortions of patent law. The Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York held invalid patents owned by Myriad Genetics on diagnostic testing for genetic susceptibility to the most common hereditary forms of breast and ovarian cancer. By "patenting" the right to determine whether the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are present in the relevant...
-
Free Software: Phase Two
Blog post by Lysandra Ohrstrom. Please email any comments on this entry to <Lohrstrom@softwarefreedom.org>.
Free software is ubiquitous. It runs everywhere on (almost) everything. The question that dominated most of the discussions at the Libre Planet Conference in Boston about a week ago is what now? How can the community capitalize on its achievements to make the movement more inclusive and reconceive the relationship between free software and privacy?
Most attendees seem to agree that it's time to proselytize to the non-hacker masses and get them to care about the privacy, freedom, and control they sacrifice when buying proprietary...
|
