MICROSOFT STARTS A SURGE (OF SORTS) IN PATENT FILINGS IN INDIA: As reported in Sify.com, Microsoft has apparently reacted to India's modification of its software patent laws in 2003 by increasing patent filings by 5 times over the previous year.

Now, before anyone gets excited, the tally for Indian patents filed by Microsoft is 304 patents, which is a tiny fraction of its US filings. Nevertheless, this appears to be a significant spike in patenting activity for Microsoft. Although Microsoft has been in India for over 10 years, some of those years were devoid of patent filings altogether:

1998 - 1 patent application filed
1999-2001 - 0 patent applications filed
2002 - 13 patent application filed
2003 - 67 patent application filed

According to the Indian Patent Facilitating Center (PFC) of the Technology Information Forecasting Assessment Council (TIFAC), the technological areas which Microsoft filed included data management (42), network (39), Web-related e-mail (30), graphics, image (20), encryption, security, authentication (17), wireless (10), speech recognition, database and architecture (9 each).