Gregnews: US law proposal against cloning patents, USPTO proposals

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

Once again, a US senator is proposing exclude certain subject matter from
patentability, and once again Greg is doing his best to discredit the
proposal.

What is most interesting however is that the patent offices are
apparently not profiting from the "war on terrorism".

There would be even better reasons to introduce a law that declares
software patents invalid, because these are detrimental to the development
of secure information infrastructures.

Further down in Gregnews, there is also a hint about the USPTO's reform
plans.  It seems that currently their main proposal is to replace the
re-examination procedure, which allows a patent to be reviewed any time,
by a european-style opposition procedure, which would restrict reviewing
to a period of 9 months or similar after issuing.

-------------------------------------

... the Dallas Morning News has done an excellent job reviewing the
ongoing sex scandal of the Catholic bishops, in particular their aiding
and abetting activities.  They have created an excellent Internet database
at:

               www.dallasnews.com/cgi-bin/2002/priests.cgi

If you are wondering what this has to do with patents, amongst other things,
there is currently an amendment to one of the anti-Terrorism Bills to
amend 35 USC 101 to ban patents on human cloning.  The sponsor of the
amendment, Senator Throwback, along with relying on questionable axiomatics
and science, draws some support for his arguments from the National Council
of Catholic Bishops, a majority of whom have done enough to merit inclusion
in the Dallas database.  More on all of this in a future PATNEWS.  For
those curious about the amendment, you can download the following
Congressional Record pages:

frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/
     cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S5514&positional=all
     cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S5515&positional=all
     cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S5516&positional=all
     cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S5517&positional=all
     cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S5518&positional=all
     cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S5519&positional=all
     cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S5520&positional=all
     cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S5521&positional=all
     cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S5522&positional=all
     cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S5523&positional=all
     cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S5524&positional=all
     cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S5525&positional=all
     cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S5526&positional=all
     cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S5527&positional=all


                              ====================

    I have obtained a copy of the PTO Master Plan, 300 pages of who knows
what.  You can download the PDF files via ftp as follows:

                        ftp.std.com/pub/srctran/pto2.pdf
                        ftp.std.com/pub/srctran/pto3.pdf
                        ftp.std.com/pub/srctran/pto4.pdf
                        ftp.std.com/pub/srctran/pto5.pdf
                        ftp.std.com/pub/srctran/pto6.pdf

It is about 7 megabytes of stuff, so try to download it in off hours (and
if the PTO was really serious about quality, the first thing it would do
so start using HTML for these type of text documents, since the HTML
version of their Master plan goes about 700K).