The Report Generator (“RPG”) is a new program from SAFE that automatically generates draft expert reports and declarations for litigation.

The Supreme Court has decided that Bilski loses his patent, but not because of the machine-or-transformation test. They also ruled that business methods are patentable, as long as they are not abstract ideas.

Over the years I’ve run into expert witnesses and attorneys who have told me about software copyright infringement cases where the only clues that copying occurred were patterns of spaces and tabs (“whitespace”). We set out to rigorously test this method.

Jimmy Winkelmann, a freshman biomedical engineering student at the University of Missouri, decided to create his very own line of sportswear and called his company The South Butt (motto: Never Stop Relaxing). The North Face, a San Leandro, California-based outdoor products company, was not amused.

Forrester Consulting just put out a report that I found interesting. According to Forrester, chief information security officers (CISOs) face increasing demands from their business units, regulators, and business partners to safeguard their information assets. Security programs protect two types of data: secrets that confer long-term competitive advantage and custodial data assets that they are compelled to protect. Secrets include product plans, earnings forecasts, and trade secrets; custodial data includes customer, medical, and payment card information that becomes “toxic” when spilled or stolen. Forrester found that enterprises are overly focused on compliance and not focused enough on protecting their secrets.

SAFE Corporation is looking for partners in academia and industry to create a database of purposely plagiarized code to be known as the Depository of Universal Plagiarism Examples or DUPE. Plagiarism detection programs would be run on DUPE to determine which programs best detected copying. Statistics about plagiarized code would be gathered in order to improve the plagiarism detection programs.

With all the uncertainty surrounding politics, there is one thing I can be certain of every year. Congress will attempt, or claim to attempt, to reform the U.S. patent system. Patrick Leahy, the chair of the US Senate’s Judiciary Committee, recently announced that reform is around the corner, just as it has been every year for many, many years. Fortunately that corner is always pretty far away. As you can tell, I’m not a fan of so-called patent reform. Here’s a brief explanation why.

The digital computer is usually credited as the invention of two professors at the University of Pennsylvania, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. Funded by the United States Army, the ENIAC computer was designed to calculate tables for launching artillery shells accurately in World War II, but was not completed until after the war in 1946. Unlike earlier computers that had a fixed purpose, ENIAC (meaning “Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer”) could be reprogrammed to handle many different purposes. But were Eckert and Mauchly really the pioneers of today’s modern digital age?

There were a number of large lawsuits involving software IP in 2009. We know that CodeSuite was used in many of them (because of protective orders, we don’t know all the cases where CodeSuite was used).

When a legal case is argued in front of a jury, both sides’ experts present their facts and the truth becomes apparent, right? Of course not–if it were that simple, experts and lawyers would not have much to do.