[Patents] (Fwd) Re: The dready threat of Hague Convention

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

> > Could you be kind and explain what should members of
> > the list undertake?

Indeed the right question.

> It would also become illegal for a programmer in Poland, Germany
> or UK to write any program that breaks the US patent, despite the
> fact, that sw patents are illegal in Europe.

This is a beginning of an answer.

There is already a case where a German programmer, prof. Dersch, was
intimidated by a US patentee (ipix inc) to take free software from the
net.  One of the reasons why Dersch backed down is that US court decisions
are already executable in Germany and vice versa to some extent through
mutual treaties.

It would be interesting to know how exactly the HC (hague convention) is
supposed to modify or extend this kind of regulation.

The "Chinese dissidents" argument makes it very clear that there will
necessarily be some limits in the system.  National law systems will be
free to create some "public order" based exceptions.  However there will
be a great pressure toward not creating them.

There are quite a few issues for which a system like that of the HC can be
helpful.  Among them are environmental issues, e.g. factories that blow
polluted air across national borders.  Here again, individual countries
may set limits to what can be executed, but the idea of accessing the
perpetrators more quickly by court is not all that unattractive.

Also, your "tax haven" example is not very convincing to me.  I don't the
"free market" as a guarantor of liberty.  It can have that function, but
it can also merely be a pretext for all kinds of powerful private groups
(Chomsky's "private tyrannies") to increase their power and further reduce
the possibilities of regulating problems in a public sphere.

All these considerations make the HC issue extremely complex, and what we
need at the moment is indeed not a crusade but more detailed information.

--
Hartmut Pilch                                           http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation        http://swpat.ffii.org/
85000 signatures against software patents         http://www.noepatents.org/