From Luuk.van.Dijk@xs4all.nl  Mon Apr  2 21:28:39 2001
From: Luuk.van.Dijk@xs4all.nl (Luuk van Dijk)
Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 22:28:39 +0200
Subject: [Patents] French State secretary for Industry against SoftPat
In-Reply-To: <20010402193030.A18810@jl1.quim.ucm.es>; from ramon@jl1.quim.ucm.es on Mon, Apr 02, 2001 at 19:30:30 +0200
References: <1225925273-51951315@away.fr> <200104021628.MAA15148@world.std.com> <20010402193030.A18810@jl1.quim.ucm.es>
Message-ID: <20010402222839.B1734@wonder>

On Mon, 02 Apr 2001 19:30:30 Ram'on Garc'ia Fern'andez wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 02, 2001 at 12:28:52PM -0400, Gregory Aharonian wrote:
> > So why not lobby the European governments to toughen the legal criteria
> > of non-obvious/inventive step, for all areas of technology, while at
> > the same time, lobbying the governments to provide funding to the 
> > Patent Offices so that examiners have more time, money and resources
> > to apply such criteria once they have done a good prior art search?
> 
> With regard to the legal criteria non-obvious/inventive step, this is
> what Luuk is doing in Holland.

Actually, this is what the FENIT is doing in NL, under close scrutiny
of VOSN, the Dutch Open Source Society.  We'd like to see these criteria so
tough that they eliminate the bulk of the 30.000 nonsense patents.  If
we can't be convinced that proposed criteria have this effect, we (and
the MP's) rather have an explicit ban on swpats.

So far, we haven't seen such criteria yet, although there are two minor
ones we seem to be agreeing on.  In particular, giving the
examiners more time and money to research novelty and inventivity is, in 
our opinion not going to change much if the cost of approving an application
remains 7 x cheaper than rejecting it.

We proposed a social game, discussed earlier on this list, which actually
goes a long way towards Greg's target of making the prior art search more
efficient, but not by giving more money to the patent attorneys, but 
instead by giving 'the industry' an incentive to do a really good search.

It appears that other parties find this far to radical a step though.

Circles around RMS appear to be worried that the VOSN pursues, in NL, a 
hollow excuse for a solution that will damage more than serve The Cause.

I can only say that this is definitely not what we intend, but if, in
our naivety we appear to be screwing up, I trust this list will wake us
up in time.  That is why we've been posting our actions here.

Wednesday 4/4 will be the next meeting here.  A summary of the outcome will
be posted here.

Regards,
	Luuk




