From our bulletin board at home:

It’s good to see Google and Microsoft playing nice (for once):

Microsoft has licensed the Exchange ActiveSync protocol to several other mobile communications players, including Apple. Horacio Gutierrez, a top Microsoft intellectual property and licensing executive, said in a statement that Google’s licensing of the patents related to the protocol “is a clear acknowledgement of the innovation taking place at Microsoft.” He said it also exemplifies the company’s “openness to generally license our patents under fair and reasonable terms so long as licensees respect Microsoft intellectual property.”

Check out Google’s new service.

Sid Rosenzweig, who recently joined PFF to study patent issues, has a very thoughtful piece about Apple’s new patent on the multi-touch interface on the iPhone, which ends as follows:

It is striking how protection for user interfaces has changed over the years.  It is not clear that patent protection for user interfaces is a step in the right direction, even for iconic breakthroughs in interfaces such as for the iPhone and iPod Touch.  The 300 diagrams in this Apple patent call to mind the 189 graphical user-interface elements of the Apple v. Microsoft copyright infringement case from the early 1990s.  The Apple v. Microsoft case prevented Apple from obtaining the protection on the overall look-and-feel of its software, and instead treated as discrete each element of the user interface.  This patent, and others like it, purport to cover the combination of several elements — here the web scrolling with the photo-album browsing — and not the discrete elements themselves.  With the Apple v. Microsoft case largely having thrown copyright out the window, and with trade dress protection excluding functional elements, patents are really the only option for companies like Apple, until and unless another solution is found.

The Federal Circuit significantly limited the patentability of software and business methods today.  Mike Masnick at TechDirt summarizes the holding of the case as follows:

the court has said that there’s a two-pronged test to determine whether a software of business method process patent is valid: (1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing. In other words, pure software or business method patents that are neither tied to a specific machine nor change something into a different state are not patentable.

I’m sure several of my TLF colleagues will have a great deal to say about this.   Tim Lee has already written about this on Ars Technica:

The Bilski decision, then, is a clear signal that the pendulum has begun to swing back toward tighter limits on software and business patents. However, it remains to be seen how far the court will go in this direction. Bilski was a relatively easy case. The applicant made little effort to hide the fact that he was seeking to patent a mental process, something the Supreme Court has clearly said is not allowed. Therefore, the Federal Circuit’s rejection of this patent doesn’t tell us how it will rule when confronted with software or business method patents that are tied more directly to a physical machine or a transformation of matter. And indeed, the Federal Circuit reiterated that some software and business method patents are valid, so we are unlikely to return to the near-prohibition on such patents that prevailed until the early 1980s.

Thoughts?