Alexander Alvaro (ALDE) has asked 9 questions about ACTA, including 3 strikes and transparency, or the access by the INTA committee to the drafts documents. He is also asking about changes to substantive patent law (read software patents here).

The European Union is on the cusp of writing public procurement rules which favour patent- and royalty-free technologies, according to software giants who argue that the rules echo Chinese public procurement laws.

By putting legal and monetary pressure on Internet service providers (in a most subtler way than in previous versions of the text), ACTA will give the music and movie industries a weapon to force them to police their networks and users themselves.

Designing for surveillance means, more or less by definition, designing a less secure, more vulnerable infrastructure.

The release of this text should not give the illusion of transparency by hiding the fact that the whole negotiation process was carried on out of public scrutiny. Moreover, ACTA could profoundly alter the Internet ecosystem by turning technical intermediaries into a copyright police of the Net.

The results of a study conducted by researchers from Duke University, Penn State University, and Intel Labs have revealed that a significant number of popular Android applications transmit private user data to advertising networks without explicitly asking or informing the user.

When the Supreme Court heard the Bilski case earlier this year, it ruled that the specific business method patent at issue in the case was invalid and contended that the patentability of intangible methods should be reduced but not eliminated. The court declined to provide clarity on the scope of software patentability, however, which leaves a lot of important questions unanswered.

Last week, we put out an action item asking people to write to the USPTO, and explain to them why software should not be eligible for patents under their forthcoming post-Bilski guidance. To answer the call, you all sent in more than 450 letters, offering the USPTO all kinds of legal and practical reasons why they should stop issuing software patents.