A new STPI to promote innovation?

    The purpose of STPI (Software Technology Parks of India), as stated on their website is to “promote the development and export of software and software services”. Under the STPI scheme, a software firm can get a ten year tax holiday on their profits from export of software and software-related services. The tax holiday scheme is obviously to promote and encourage the software export business, and has been quite successful. According to NASSCOM estimates, the IT and BPO sector accounts for around 6% of India's GDP in 2009 and 2010. However, a troubling trend has been that these Indian software firms have been concentrating largely on software services, rather than invest in software products. A quick look at TCS and Infosys' revenue break up from Q3 2011 (Sep 30, 2011) and 2010 whole year, respectively, reveals this disproportionate skew towards services.

To understand the reason for this services-skew, it may be necessary to first define how a software product and a software service differ. A software product is, essentially, licensed. The buyer does not get the intellectual property rights to the software, but a license to use it. The seller of the software product is still responsible for defending the IPR in the software, as well as indemnifying the buyer of any infringement claims by a third party. A software service, on the other hand, does not involve any kind of licensing. It is a pure sub-contracting of software activities from the buyer to the provider of these services. In these cases, usually, the service provider does not own any intellectual property rights to the software being delivered. The service provider gets paid as the service is being produced.

Android strikes back!

Aha! This will be interesting now. HTC is sue-ing Apple using patents it bought from Google, which Google got from Motorola.

Everyone in the industry knew that Google is stocking up patent ammunition to lead it's counter-attack against Apple & Microsoft. This move also redeems Google's lost credibility among Android licensees (handset manufacturers like HTC and Samsung) when it acquired Motorola. I would expect very soon to hear news of Samsung fighting back the injunctions against Galaxy tabs with similar Google-supplied patents. A proxy patent war has started. Clash of the titans, indeed!

All About "bogus & dubious patents"

It's pretty well known that Google does not like what is calls "dubious patents". This recent post by David Drummond, Google Cheif Legal Officer, blames Microsoft, among other companies for attacking the Android licensees with infringement cases wrt bogus patents. So what really are "dubious" or "bogus" patents?


A "good" patent is one which conforms to the N.U.N. test, where

N = Novelty, i.e. it's a new idea or invention.
U = Utility, i.e. it has commercial use.
N = Non-obvious, i.e. it involves innovation and not something quite obvious to the industry.


"Bogus" patents are those that fail in one or more of the above areas. In his paper on "Injunctions, Hold Up & Patent Royalties", Carl Shapiro uses the term "questionable patents" to describe this. He further states 

[These questionable patents were] likely to be invalid or contain overly broad claims. The National Academies of Science (2004) expressed concern that many patents are issued for inventions that should in fact be considered “obvious”...