EFF, Public Knowledge Sue US Government Over Secret IP Pact

the news comes from Grant Gross, IDG News Service: http://www.pcworld.com/article/151213/suit_secret_treaty.html?tk=rss_news Two digital rights advocacy groups have filed a lawsuit against the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) in an attempt to get the office to turn over information about a secret international treaty being negotiated to step up cross-border enforcement of copyright and piracy laws. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Public Knowledge filed the lawsuit Wednesday after USTR ignored their repeated requests to turn over information about the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). ACTA could include an agreement for the U.S., Canada, the European Commission and other nations that are part of the talks to enforce each other's intellectual-property (IP) laws, with residents of each country subject to criminal charges when violating the IP laws of another country, according to a supposed ACTA discussion paper posted on Wikileaks.org in May. The document posted on Wikileaks also talks about increasing border searches in an effort to find counterfeit goods, encouraging ISPs (Internet service providers) to remove online material that infringes copyrights and increased cooperation in destroying infringing goods and the equipment used to make them. The full text of the ACTA has not been released, despite requests by EFF and Public Knowledge, as well as Canadian groups. Wikileaks is a site that posts anonymous submissions of sensitive documents. "ACTA raises serious concerns for citizens' civil liberties and privacy rights," EFF international policy director Gwen Hinze said in a statement. "This treaty could potentially change the way your computer is searched at the border or spark new invasive monitoring from your ISP. People need to see the full text of ACTA now, so that they can evaluate its impact on their lives and express that opinion to their political leaders. Instead, the USTR is keeping us in the dark while talks go on behind closed doors."

Obama may be worse for patent policy than MacCain

Unfortunately, Senator Obama is addressing the problem of patent reform, but in a negative way. Senator Obama, along with Senators Hatch and Leahy, were the primary sponsors of the Senate version of the Patent Reform Act that just went down to defeat in the Senate. So, if Obama is elected President, he will definitely sign this awful piece of legislation into law. Practitioners whom I know have contacted Senator McCain, and they tell me that he is willing to listen to reason. Exactly what that means, I do not know.

Why the horse-shaped house is a problem patent

In a recent post, I mentioned a patent on a horse-shaped house (U.S. patent 5,564,239). Here is a very thorough analysis from a reader: The patent for a horse shaped sculpture may also be a good example of a weak patent examination process in action. The first cited patent - from 1882 - really sets forth the entire concept of an animal shaped building. Including stating "The building may be of the form of any other animal than an elephant, as that of a fish, fowl, & etc." That description pretty clearly includes a horse, and anyone looking at the patent - or the actual buildings that resulted, would surely realize that the building could be shaped like a horse, or a cow, or any other animal. Isn't it obvious to surround a building (of any sort) with a garden and/or a moat, and/or a fence? Lets see - gardens have surrounded buildings for centuries, and we've all seen castles from 500 years ago which are surrounded by water (and even have gardens in some cases - and even bridges over the moats). Is it novel to make the outline of the garden, or the moat, octagonal? Wouldn't that be an obvious extension, of say, a pentagonal or hexagonal shape? In fact if I wanted to spend an hour or so I bet I can find an octagonal moat surrounding a building. And thus with the prior art you have the '239 patent. But it is an amusing patent. I remember visiting Lucy the Elephant - built from Lafferty's 1882 design in Margate NJ. It was a decrepit relic when I was young, but has since been restored. See the story at: http://www.lucytheelephant.org/ The web site includes historical descriptions of other similar structures, how they were used for amusement purposes, etc. By the way -- Lucy the Elephant is surrounded by a rectangular fence, with an opening. Is it really an invention to make the fence octagonal instead of rectangular, rhetorically speaking?