Imagine if… the cure to the AIDS virus was patented on discovery.
This is the third and final e-poster in our ‘Imagine if…’ campaign, with a very real warning of how the patenting process has tangible, life-or-death consequences in Africa. We ask you to upload the new e-poster to your blog or social networking profiles, as a way to drive home the importance of the patent issue, and the role that FTISA plays, and will continue to play, in reforming patent policy, legislation and practice in South Africa.
A big thank you to Pria Chetty who provided the inspiration for this poster; along with those who contributed their slogans to this campaign over the last month. Also kudos to Infiltrate Media who interpreted the slogans to produced these stunning images.
To all those who have confirmed their attendance at the event – this is a final reminder for the AGM tomorrow, which starts at 2.00pm until 7.30pm at the University of the Witwatersrand, Administrative Block, Room CB8. This is going to be a highly interactive event, so be ready to contribute, contribute, contribute! A detailed programme for the afternoon is available here.
And to those who cannot attend the event, we are planning on live blogging the proceedings, so join us on the homepage of this website (http://ftisa.org.za) from 2pm for a blow-by-blow account of the AGM.
Hot off the press – the latest FTISA e-poster has just been released! Thanks to Derek Keats for his contribution to the “Imagine if…” campaign, which we used as the inspiration for our latest image.
Imagine if there was no secret science. According to Derek, secret science is “where the output of research is only made accessible to a few elite people or locked up through patents, which are designed to withhold disclosure and creates a monopoly.” He explains this in the context of the number of scientific research papers that are published per year: Did you know that the United States publishes 690 scientific research papers per million people per year, compared to Africa’s 8.2 per million people per year? This is a worrying difference, one that Keats believes can be mended by lowering the barriers to innovation through the use of ‘open science’ i.e. free and open source software and open knowledge, which act as catalysts to stimulate innovation, and thus the growth of publicly funded scientific research. Closed science, on the other hand, signifies a very clear ‘No Entry’, creating barriers to entry and prohibiting innovation built “on the shoulders of giants.”
So does the stat above get you riled up, get your blood boiling and your eyes popping? Well, there are three things you can do:
Do some DEEP BREATHING exercises. This will increase the amount of oxygen in your body and make you feel relaxed, calm and serene.
SHARE this poster on your website, blog, social networking or IM profile, write a blog entry about it and get people to participate in the Imagine If… campaign to spread the word about this issue.
JOIN US at the AGM and play an active role in shaping the future of this organization and its activities. The event will be held on Wednesday, 27 January 2010 from 2.00pm until around 7.30pm at the University of the Witwatersrand, Administrative Block, Room CB8. Please RSVP to ftisa@africancommons.org should you wish to attend. There will be remote participation so let us know if you wish to participate via Skype.
This is a great presentation by Derek Keats on FOSS innovation. The slideshow takes us through what innovation is and looks at the barriers to innovation. Keats also highlights how FOSS should be viewed as a learning resource and outlines the different types of model strategies that there are. Keats also looks at recent major software innovations such as Google and Facebook which have changed the way we think, learn and share.
We love the sentiment: SAY NO TO SECRET SCIENCE!
If you’re new to the world of software patents, here’s a short introductory video to the issues raised in this debate (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). It explains how software patents inhibit innovation, about the high cost of registering and challenging a patent and how it excludes small players from the market.
Another key point made in this clip is how software development is an ‘instruction’ rather than a invention as such. The argument is that software development is a set of instructions which are written, and then implemented by the machine, like “a game, business method or abstract idea”.
I’d be interested to hear what software developers out there think about this point – when you’re writing code are you ‘inventing’ or ‘instructing’?
FTISA is submitting comments to the South African parliamentary committee on the new IPR bill on publicly funded research.
The FTISA submission on the bill can be found here. You will need to be invited by a FTISA member to participate in adding your inputs to the document.
Hello everyone,
Last week I wrote a letter (viewable on my blog on the Chsimba Alpha code test site here) to Stafford Masie of Novell South Africa, which I copied to a couple of mailing lists, and which in turn was picked up an published on a number of news sites. I would like to clarify my concerns, and report on the conversation that I have had with representatives of Novell.
In the letter I expressed dissatisfaction regarding Novell’s covenant with Microsoft about software patents. I suggested that this covenant had created considerable discord within the Free Software community, and that this could constitute risk to the ability of Novell to deliver on our business requirements as a customer.
It is important to clarify that I have no objection in principle to the part of the agreement relating to interoperability between GNU/Linux and Windows. Indeed, I suspect that this will be benefit penetration of GNU/Linux into the enterprise.
The Free and Open Source Software ecosystem differs from proprietary software ecosystems in having a strong element of community, which is itself heterogeneous in nature. The success of Free and Open Source Software depends not only on the quality of the technology and the actions of companies, but also on the behaviour of this community. Read the rest of this entry »
The USPTO operates very similarly to the SA roadworthy test. Patents are rarely rejected outright. Their claims are examined and the examiner returns a report of all the things which need to be fixed.
All the claims of MS Wordprocessing-XML patent were rejected by the US examiner back in June. Of the 31 claims, 29 were plain rejected and the remaing 2 objected to.
MS cancelled all the existing claims (1 – 31) submitted a set of amended claims (32 – 41). You might be curious to know that the USPTO examiner has just finished examining the new claims and rejected the whole lot of them! The primary basis for the rejection of the new claims is prior art from Abiword.
You can follow all the documented correspendence between MS and the USPTO by making use of the portal:
http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair
You must select “Publication Number” and enter “US 2004-0210818 A1″. The system is VERY fussy so be exact or you get nowhere.
It seems that the USPTO examiner really has something against this patent application. Of course, the version that is already granted in our office is the original 31 claims. It seems that the EPO (European) application has not yet gone for examination. It looks like they will probably wait until they finally get a “roadworthy” from the USPTO before amending the claims accordingly and request examination in Europe. Seems like they are not getting an easy ride.
(Contributed by Bob Joliffe)
There is some good news – it seems the UK patent office just turned down a trivial software patent (similar in nature to the MS XML patent) sought by Oracle.
The patent officer made the following judgments:
“Stephen Probert drew on other guidance in CFPH’s case, where the judge had pointed out that the European Patent Convention of 1973 had excluded computer programs from the scope of patentability because they would do more harm than good. The policy behind the exclusion was that computer programs as such “could not be foreclosed to the public under patent law.” The argument runs that to grant a patent for software would stifle the market.
Read the full story.
The Imagine If... Campaign
Latest on Tue, 01:12 pm: ..language was patented and couldn't evolve
: open science amongst African scientists was not science fiction...
: the cure to the AIDS virus was patented on discovery...
: the International Standards Organisation required standards to be open
: poor entrepreneurs could innovate without fear of being sued by multinationals
: Imagine if you could use the research paid for by your taxes
: Imagine if when your taxes paid to write code then you could use that code
: There is no freedom without freedom to innovate!
: My taxes my content
: Einstein stayed in a patent office
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