This week's patent news in numbers

The number of years until the European Community patent will be up and running , according to Gunther Verheugen, the German enterprise commissioner, speaking at the recent European Patent Forum (also see story here). German Chancellor Angela Merkel says, "patents are the future".

The IPKat looks forward to 2012, when it will all be sorted out. In the meantime, would anyone care to take a bet on the timescale being right?


The number in millions of dollars that CSR is paying to the Washington Research Foundation to stop their US customers being sued over WRF's patent (see story here, and previous IPKat post here).

left: Apollo 15 (the best one by far).





The number of dollars that each Windows user apparently pays to keep Microsoft patent lawyers happy, according to the Software Freedom Law Centre, reported here.



The US patent that is the subject of a new lawsuit against Microsoft by Vertical Computer Systems (reported here).