[Patents] reimbursing lost revenues

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

> Each court _may_ decide on everything -- however, it has none but
> local meaning.

While this sounds like a good principle and is in line with what happened
in the australian-german holocaust denial website case, there is little
reason to believe that German courts won't execute american patent
verdicts against german subjects, just because Australian courts do not
agree to the particular German penal laws against holocaust denial.

German courts have been executed American patent verdicts for a few years,
and they have stated an explicit exception which doesn't help Dersch very
much: that the American concept of 'punitive damages' is incompatible with
the German law order and any decisions based on it will not be executed in
Germany.  I haven't heard of any court decision saying that certain types
of patents are incompatible with German law.

German courts have allowed software patents and are also using a concept
of calculating 'lost revenues' and making the infringer pay for those.
This means that individuals can be and are regularly ruined by patent
infringement litigation even in cases where they didn't make a cent for
themselves.

The US courts, under instigation of the CAFC, go even further, by
punitively multiplying the 'lost revenues' by a certain factor >1.  Even
if punitive multiplication is not allowed in Germany, the risk of having
to reimburse iPIX for the loss of their shareholder value (from 60$ to a
few cents, as Bernard showed us), seems too high for a math professor to
take.

--
Hartmut Pilch                                           http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation        http://swpat.ffii.org/
79100 signatures against software patents         http://www.noepatents.org/