Supreme Court Rules on Software Patentability

In a hotly watched case involving the patent-eligibility of software, the U.S. Supreme Court today issued an unanimous (that’s right, unanimous) opinion striking down a software patent on the basis that it was merely an abstract idea and that implementation using conventional computer functions on a generic computer is not sufficient to transform the idea […]

Oracle v. Google – Interoperability and Copyright Infringement

If you thought that you could do whatever you needed to do to achieve interoperability and be safe from copyright infringement, think again.  The Federal Circuit’s ruling last Friday in Oracle v. Google puts a finer point on the limits of interoperability as a defense to copyright infringement. Quick Background (if you know the facts […]

Are Application Programming Interfaces (API) Copyrightable?

On the one year anniversary of the judge’s decision in Oracle vs. Google throwing levitra dosage timing out a jury’s findings and ruling that Oracle’s Java API’s were not copyrightable, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is chiming in with its perspective. A little background.  The case is Oracle v. Google, 872 F.Supp.2d 974 (N.D.Cal. 2012).  Oracle […]

Do You Monitor Use of “Copyleft” Open Source?

This was one of the questions asked as part of the 2012 NJ IT Survey discussed in a previous blog post.  With the potential for risk to intellectual property ownership, contract breaches and other liability, the responses were quite surprising.  Fewer than half of the respondents said that they either prohibited the use of copyleft […]