Are Patents a key source of information?
So the star covers an article saying that “Patents (are a) key source of info” who quotes from Marshall Phelps, vice-president of Microsoft Corp’s intellectual property policy, strategy and licensing group.
Of course someone in the position of Microsoft would say that.
If you would like to be updated on the issue with regards to Software Patents here are a few links:
- How Software Patents Actually Work (video)
- Software Patents: Background, Discussion, and Illustration of Harm (odt) by Ditesh Kumar
- Software Patents (wikipedia)
- Software Patent debate (wikipedia)
- Software Patents in Action
Anyways for Malaysians, I would like to bring up this.
Microsoft IP Ventures unit is a licensing and startup programme that was launched in 2005 and seeks to take advantage of this wave of open innovation.
According to Phelps, there are currently 50 technologies available for licensing from the IP Ventures programme.
Present, Malaysia does not recognize Software Patents, (which I think may be overturned soon). I am not sure about the IP Ventures unit, but my understanding of various licensing is as follows:
First of all there are two kinds of licensing, one is for the technology itself, where Microsoft will license to you the technology they have developed, so that you can utilize it in your software. So you don’t have to waste time building the technology. The other one is a license to the Software Patent. If you opt to license the Software Patent, then you can build your own technologies that tread on the patent portfolio/minefield that Microsoft has setup without worrying about litigation/it-exploding. But since Malaysia does not recognize Software Patents there is no need to license Software Patents in Malaysia.
I’ll continue to argue against the case of Software Patents in general in a later blog post once I find the time.
software patent is bad for small companies and technological growth alike
Jun 17th, 2007 at 1:44 am