From srctran@world.std.com  Fri Dec  1 16:41:22 2000
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2000 11:41:22 -0500 (EST)
From: Gregory Aharonian srctran@world.std.com
Subject: [Patents] Be's fear of sw patents

>From BEOS SEC Q10 filing

Such disclaimers about potential patent liabilities appear in the
SEC reports of companies from all industries.  They are included
to cover-one's-ass, so that if they get sued in the future, 
someone can't accuse them of not alerting stockholders ahead of
time to a future liability.

Once again, another example of what the software technology
industry has in common with other technology industries.

On another topic, people are talking about shortened terms for
(software) patents.  There was a study that came out of one of
the German universities a few years ago that showed that other
than certain pharmaceuticals whose patents were maintained for
the full term, that again, for all industries including software,
the effective term of most patents as measured by renewal rates
is about seven years.  The study was done in Germany, because
patents are renewed every year (as opposed to every four years
in the US), which made it easy to apply renewal statistics
formulas to the raw data.  

So playing around with patent terms in reality won't have much of
an effect on anything - most patents already experience short
lives until they are abandoned to the public domain.

Greg Aharonian




