[Patents] How to prevent a patent

[PILCH Hartmut phm@a2e.de]

> > As Greg told us, they may not be of much use as proofs, unless stored in
> > some village library in paper form with a time stamp.
>
> No. All sorts of proofs are taken in account by EPO. Many search reports I
> recently considered comprises web publications.

I just dealt with a chemistry case at the EPO where the true inventor was
I think eve unable to conclusively prove that he had invented the thing,
although he brought a large amount of proofs and it was evident to me that
the other party, who had patented his technology, had stolen it from him.
I think even the EPO judges knew it, but they applied very severe criteria
to the proofs provided.  And rightly so.

> > If you publish knowledge, then it is no longer your property.  If you
> > dont want to dissipate it, then dont publish it.  The patent system allows
> > people to publish and own knowledge at the same time,

> More precisely : you diffuse the knowledge that because available for
> every one, but you become, until the expiration of the patent, the
> owner of the COMMERCIAL exploitation rights of the claimed invention,
> limited on the claimed technical characteristics.

The border between "diffused knowledge" and "commercial exploitation"
becomes very unsharp when it comes to computer programs.  I'd say that
this basic distinction, on which the patent system is built, no longer
applies when the "product" itself consists of information.

E.g. I don't understand how for example the concept of

        Multilingual Computer Programs
        http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/pikta/mupli/ep669021/
        http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/pikta/mupli/ep669021/claims.html
        http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/pikta/mupli/ep669021/img/en/pikta.pdf

declared by the EPO to be property of Microsoft Corporation in 1997 with
priority date 1992, can be divided into "technical characteristics" and
"knowledge".

Everything that is technical about this is not new, and what is allegedly
new is not technical.  It is just a principle of formal logics.

When I use this principle to publish programs (e.g. by using the gettext
or catgets modules of GLibC), I am already diminishing Microsoft's
exploitation rights.  On the other hand, there is no material object whose
reproduction costs something and thus necessarily entails some kind of
commercially organised distribution with a profit margin, from which a
patent fee could be deduced.

> > For many industries, business secret and some other strategies provide
> > enough of an incentive for innovation, so that there is no need to impose
> > renunciation of natural rights on everybody.
>
> I agree : Secret, dissemination of technical results, patenting of 
> innovations
> are differents strategies. Nobody has to impose one of them to every body.

By keeping knowledge to yourself, you don't impose anything on
anybody.  By patenting it you do.  By introducing a patent system, you
do even more so:  you impose a set of rules from which nobody can escape.
Even large companies like Siemens see themselves as captives of this
system, see the speech of their patent department head Arno Koerber at

        http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/papri/boch77-koerber/

The patent system is a system that imposes itself and leaves no room for
other models.  This itself is a reason to be very critical of it.

-phm