Berkeley Patent News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Technology and Innovation As the American economy struggles to recover from the Great Recession, it may have no better medicine than Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution. Unanimously approved by the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the “patent clause” authorized the new government to “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” This conception of intellectual-property rights was strongly supported by James Madison and Thomas Jeffe...

true interoperability while affording software creations a reasonable degree of intellectual property protection. In most cases software copyright isn't an obstacle to interoperability because the creators of application programming interfaces (APIs) frequently have an interest in the adoption of their creations. Self-regulation works, and it actually is possible to do clean-room implementations of the Java APIs, subject to reasonable terms and conditions that Google didn't want to accept. But every now and then there could be a problem with a right holder wielding copyright in an effort to p...