[Patents] Re: Company questionnaire

[Bernard Lang Bernard.Lang@inria.fr]

These are good questions...

  and a proper reply to patent people.

I have had the opportunity to attend talks from patent office or IP
consulting people to the average industrial executive :
  The talk is always about them preserving their intellectual
property, and never about them being infringers, though it can easily
happen.

  Those people being (generally) honest, they never see themselves as
infringers, and do not realize the risk.

Bernard


On Thu, Jun 22, 2000 at 11:58:05AM +0100, Edward Avis wrote:
> >From: Hans Schou <chlor@schou.dk>
> 
> >Subject: [Patents] Company questionaire, Denmark
> 
> >In cooperation with danish politicians we are going to send
> >a questionaire to danish software companies.
> >
> >Have you any suggestions to the following questions?
> 
> I think the questions put too much emphasis on 'will you use patents
> against other companies' and not enough on 'are you worried about others
> attacking you'.  In particular, the risk analysis question is tucked
> away at the end.
> 
> This may be biased, but I would have questions looking more like this:
> 
> - How many lines of code are contained in your currently marketed
> software?
> 
> - How long would it take you to check each line for infringement of any
> given software patent?
> 
> - Have you performed a risk analysis of being sued for infringement of
> one of the thousands of software patents already granted in the US?
> 
> Perhaps those questions are too loaded.  But you need something a little
> more in that direction IMHO.
> 
> -- 
> Ed Avis
> epa98@doc.ic.ac.uk

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