james holden

Tomorrow, the patent infringement lawsuit brought against eBay will be heard by a U.S. supreme court judge. The case has been brought by a small company, MercExchange, and covers eBay’s ‘Buy-It-Now’ function.

The case is being closely watched, not only by the software industry, but by the pharmaceutical industries, who see it as an important reinforcement of patent rights. This is more than a little flawed though. I can see how patents may be beneficial to the pharmaceutical industry due to the massive investment required to develop a new drug, but the concept of patenting software inventions is rather different. There is simply no way that a ‘Buy’ button on a website comes anywhere near the complexity and development effort of a new vaccine or treatment.

With a little luck, the outcome of this case will be favourable and strike a blow against the system of software patentability in the U.S., and consequently the its introduction into Europe.

A colleague pointed me to the Pear HTML_AJAX library today. The library essentially allows nominated PHP classes to be instantiated and called from Javascript on the client end. It looks very cool indeed. I think I’ll have a look at this for the WYLUG talk manager I’m writing.