[Patents] French State secretary for Industry against SoftPat

[ramon@jl1.quim.ucm.es (Ram'on Garc'ia Fern'andez)]

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.

I do not think that a good prior art search is the real problem,
because as I explained you before, if an invention is really worth of
patent protection, the probability of being duplicated or reinvented
is small. If an invention is likely to be in prior art, that means that
the incentive of patent is not necessary for that invention; the real
problem is the criterion of the law about what is patentable.

Ramon