Some of the latest patent news with emphasis on software.

TiVo's shift to a strategy of patent litigation is not paying off, patent trolling becomes common, Microsoft rides the wave

Since the main point of the Free Software Foundation's new GPL3 (General Public License 3) is to prevent "TiVo-isation," this surely does not come as a surprise. TiVo says: "If the currently proposed version of GPLv3 is widely adopted, we may be unable to incorporate future enhancements to the GNU/Linux operating system into our software, which could adversely affect our business."

TiVo is preemptively sued by Microsoft for alleged patent violation and Microsoft's PR puts together some lies to disguise the real cause

Anascape's patent attacks on gaming consoles and ongoing discussions about the the Community Patent in Europe

A lengthy debate that began with a suggestion to dual license the Linux kernel under the GPLv2 and the GPLv3 [story] continues on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Throughout the ongoing thread Linux creator Linus Torvalds has spoken out on the GPLv2, the upcoming GPLv3, the BSD license, Tivo, the Free Software Foundation, and much more.

The latest news about patents with emphasis on software

" The future of software patents in Europe is uncertain. The Software Patent Directive was rejected by the European Parliament on the 6th of July 2005, after seven years of campaigning by people in FSFE and other organisations - most notably, one of our associate organisations, FFII. This was a monumental victory and displays the legislative competence of the Free Software community. However, the struggle is not over. Information about the current status of software patents in the EU can be found in this November 2007 blog entry: Do software patents exist in the EU?

The software patent issue is likely to return via initiatives such as the Community Patent or the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA)..."

While I'm certainly a big fan of involving more people in the process of reviewing patents, I've been a huge skeptic of the "Peer-to-Patent" program that the USPTO tested over the past few years. As I noted earlier, there's very little incentive for most people to actually get involved in peer reviewing a patent that early on.