[Patents] interview

[PILCH Hartmut phm@a2e.de]

> Do you think, I'm paid for participate in AFUL's debat ?

No, but you make your living as a patent attorney (conseil en brevets),
and your target customers are those small and medium enterprises who don't
have their own patent department but are more or less forced to play by
the rules of the patent system.  Thus if the European Commission
introduces/confirms software patentability, this means more customers and
more money for you.

There is nothing wrong with this.  One can have a bias and still try to be
honest.

What seems more questionable is that you always claim to be speaking for
your patent customers.  Your submission to the European Commission claims
that it is a submission of 30 start-ups, but not a single one of these
start-ups is mentioned by name.  Could it be that these start-ups don't
exist, or that they are merely patent businesses without any impressive
contribution to software innovation?  Or why else do you hide them?

Also, your claim that software patents protect small companies and are
helpful to start-ups are mere reiterations of old patent ideology
positions.  You fail to take into consideration what software patents are,
how they are granted, how many of them are granted, how they are used,
what they protect, how the patent game is played in reality and what it
costs to play this game.

In the end, companies will conform to any kind of legal rules that you
impose on them.  But there is little at the moment to indicate that it is
particularly small companies that want the rules of the patent game to be
imposed.  It is you and the members of your community who are trying to
impose those rules, for evident reasons.  You are the aggressor, and you
are trying to hide behind your victims.

In reality we have a conflict of interest between the software industry
and the patent industry, which includes patent lawyers and patent
departments of big corporations.  You know that and do your best to make
it appear otherwise, i.e. as a conflict between start-up businesses and
some strange new sect of free software philosophers.  This is a discourse
directed only to people who lack understanding, and probably written by
people who lack understanding.

Any journalist who talks to you should take a very close look at who those
enterprises are that you claim to represent.  But unfortunately very few
journalists take the time serious investigative work.  And if they do
spend that time, they should imho better go right to the centers of the
patent lobby, such as the patent bureaucrats at the European Commission,
the European Patent Office, the patent departments of IBM, Alcatel, Bull,
Siemens etc.

I'd also like to recommend some of the introductory texts on my website,
available mostly in German and English, many also in French

        http://swpat.ffii.org/
        http://swpat.ffii.org/stidi

        http://swpat.ffii.org/stidi/frili/
        Why Software Patents are so Trivial

        http://swpat.ffii.org/stidi/tisna/
        The Mechanisms of Patent Inflation

The contain further links.  Especially

        http://www.qualcomm.com/karn/patents/patents.html

is impressive, since it is written by a very competent and innovative
software author who is working for a very patent-centered company:
Qualcomm.  Companies like Qualcomm are actually among the few winners of
the patent system that are not large corporations.  Qualcomm is a pain in
the neck for Siemens and Alcatel:  they develop nothing but patents.

-phm