Following the Supreme Court's decision in Bilski v. Kappos, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) plans to release new guidance as to which patent applications will be accepted, and which will not. As part of this process, they are seeking input from the public about how that guidance should be structured.

Richard Stallman made an unexpected appearance at a European Patent Office presentation in Brisbane today.

Stallman, pictured, who was also due to address the World Computer Congress later in the day, carried a placard that said: "Don't get caught in software patent thickets".

Judge Tena Campbell has today ruled against SCO, who had asked to go forward against IBM in SCO v. IBM, without letting IBM go forward on its most significant claims. "The court declines," her order says, to reopen anything now, because too much depends on what happens in SCO v. Novell, and it doesn't make sense to divide the two cases.

Right now I'm facing what I'd consider the most outrageous case that I've been involved so far: A manufacturer of Linux-based embedded devices (no, I will not name the company) really has the guts to go in front of court and sue another company for modifying the firmware on those devices. More specifically, the only modifications to program code are on the GPL licensed parts of the software.

ACTA aims at circumventing democracy to impose now and later repressive legislation through secret negotiations. The European Parliament now has a unique occasion to firmly oppose it.

As you likely heard on any number of news sites, Oracle has filed suit against Google, claiming that Android infringes some of its Java-related copyrights and patents. Too little information is available about the copyright infringement claim to say much about it yet; we expect we'll learn more as the case proceeds.

These trolls are threatening the future of all aggregation sites. Every article will have to be checked before posting to insure that they don't secretly hold a copyright.