“Information Age innovators need not apply. At least that’s the implied message being stretched like police tape across the door of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO). The agency seems fixated on eliminating the last, true, sustainable American advantage: our capacity to innovate,” John Kheit reports for BusinessWeek. “Recent moves by the USPTO have resulted in a precedent-setting legal victory that now threatens software patents with extinction, putting companies like Apple and Google at risk along with the U.S. economy.”
“Software is key to modern innovation. But more important, it’s among the last strongholds in American economic might. Open the box on a new Apple product, and you’ll see a note saying ‘Designed by Apple in California.’ It leaves out the implicit ‘made in China.’ That’s what America does. It innovates. It designs. It conceives and invents. Today, America makes ideas. And then we outsource the manufacture of our ideas, and sell those to the world. Indeed, in just a few decades, the U.S. has gone from a country that largely produced tangible goods to one that produces blueprints for intellectual property. And one of the greatest areas of intellectual property production in the U.S., as noted by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, is software,” Kheit reports.
“Notably, during Apple’s recent quarterly report, Jobs commented about the iPhone: ‘The traditional game in the phone market has been to produce a voice phone in 100 different varieties. [W]e approach it as a software platform company, which is pretty different from most of our competitors,'” Kheit reports.
“Now, it appears the USPTO is hell-bent on destroying such intellectual property rights,” Kheit reports. “The most recent evidence came from an Oct. 30 ruling by an appeals court that could narrow what’s patentable and make it much more costly to obtain patents, particularly for newer companies. Some fear the decision also leaves many innovative software technologies in limbo.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Carl H.” for the heads up.]