[Patents] consultation questions

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

On Tue, May 08, 2001 at 10:14:30AM +0200, Pierre Breese (gepicaam) wrote:
> Amid, the prime Minister Lionel JOSPIN recently wrote that "patent has to be
> granted only for patentable inventions" ! Of course, such a consensual
> affirmation will satisfy everyone, but will not help the legibility and
> clarification of French official stance...

Here Jospen is probably talking about trivial patents that should not
be granted, but nevertheless are granted (and enforced).

(Next quote belongs to Greg, however Pierre Breese assents).

> Of course, if you are hostile to SMEs (like established companies and
> some European governments), than trying to weaken patent protection
> and ignoring the goal of improving patent quality is the position to
> take.  Being (or trying to be) an SME, I take, and have taken, the
> exact opposite position.  And hopefully someday I will come up with
> an idea viable enough to attract venture capital investment, and will
> damn well want to be able to patent it, even if it is software.

Pierre, I suppose that the kind of patents you are talking about is
patent that cover the idea of a new product, right?

This patents are in general unfair because the idea of a product is
cheap. It does not require any research effort. Some naive people
think that this is useful for small companies that wish to protect
their great idea of a new product against competition from larger
companies. Apart from being unfair, this does not work. Large
companies have arsenals of trivial patents so that it is virtually
imposible to do anything that does not infringe their patents. They
use their patents for defending themselves, so that if you sue them
they countersue you.  For example, if you write a program that is
translated to several languages you will be infringing a patent of
Microsoft (the only posible way of writting multilingual programs
without a separate executable for each one).  Large companies have
plenty of ideas. It is more likely that a small company wishes to
compete against them than viceversa.

Ramon