My book on software intellectual property has just been published by Prentice-Hall.

Social network games have burst onto the Internet with amazing speed and popularity. There’s a lot of money to be made and a lot of users to capture. There’s also a lot of copying going on. Some of that copying is legitimate and some is infringement. Our Online IP Screening Service found code in common between Zynga’s FarmVille and CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium game. Was is illicit, perfectly allowed, or just coincidence

Sometimes a full-course meal is more than you need, have time for, or are willing to pay for. Sometimes fast food just hits the spot. That’s why we’re introducing CodeSuite-LT, a lower priced version of CodeSuite with most of the functionality at much lower cost.

The Peer-to-Patent program seems like a good idea. In order to speed up the granting of good patents and quickly eliminate the bad ones, allow people from everywhere and anywhere to submit prior art. If that’s actually the way it worked, it would be a great resource for finding prior art and making the patent office more efficient. Unfortunately my experience is that the program creates more problems than it fixes.

SAFE Corporation announces CodeScreener, its online plagiarism detection service for software. online, it’s interactive, and it’s much less expensive than standalone CodeSuite.

Learn about the multiprocessing version of CodeSuite.

SAFE announces the release of CodeSuite 4.0 that includes CodeCLOC for measuring how software evolves across versions of code. CodeCLOC uses the same algorithms that were implemented in CodeMeasure and that were developed for the landmark software transfer pricing case Symantec v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue.

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.

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).

If you have a research idea relating to code analysis, and you can use the SAFE tools, let us know. If your proposal passes our review process you’ll get free licenses to our tools, free support, and help getting your results published.