From srctran@world.std.com  Fri Nov 24 22:19:19 2000
Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2000 17:19:19 -0500 (EST)
From: Gregory Aharonian srctran@world.std.com
Subject: [Patents] Economic assessment

On Fri, 24 Nov 2000, Edward Avis wrote:
>Since the current quality of software patents from the EPO is very poor,
>wouldn't you agree that *for the time being* there should not be
>software patents in Europe, at least not until the EPO has cleaned up
>its act and hired examiners with some degree of clue?

No, because solving these problems at the USPTO and the EPO are not that
difficult or costly.  First, I have met many of the software examiners
at EPO, and all of them have high "degress of clue", with advanced
degress and many years of experience.  Examiner quality is not the
problem.

Rather, it is the examiner's access, and time to consider, the prior art
that is the problem.  The examiner need the actual (non-patent) prior art
item in hand, on their desk, to issue a rejection.  Given much better
access to the prior art, the EPO and PTO would be rejecting the vast
majority of the software patents (and to a lesser degree hardware patents,
mechanical patents, etc.), especially the crappy bad ones that we both
like to ridicule.

What would it take?  Tens of millions of dollars spent each year for a
few years, on the average, say $500 US extra spent on each patent
application.  Now I know that governments and industry on both sides
of the Atlantic can afford to spend such monies, and don't.

So why don't you get all of those "concerned" EU politicians who voted
against software patents to show some real concern and vote them monies
to allow examiners to do their jobs better?  Cynically, I suspect the
real reason the EU politicians want to break up the EPO is not because
of their attitude towards software patents (how many EU politicians
really understand modern information processing, mathematics and
computing - I will tell you - as few as US politicians), but rather 
because the EU politicians want to divert the big bucks flowing into
EPO into their national offices (just like US politicians keep on
stealing US PTO fees).

It is easy and not that costly to solve much of the problems with bad
software patents in the short term.  In fact, I bet EPO would be very
appreciative if you all pestered the EU politicians to help the EPO
get to more monies to turn out a higher quality software patent.
Instead of fighting EPO, you might want to consider how to work with
them to kill these stupid software patents before they issue - and if
nothing else, get a nice big multimillion dollar donation from your
buddies at IBM who soooooooo support patent quality.

Because in the end, the price of not changing 52.c will be the end of
patents on digital hardware.

Greg




