[Patents] German Gov't publishes Swpat Study

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

Under

http://www.bmwi.de/Homepage/Presseforum/Pressemitteilungen/2001/1B15prm2.jsp

you find a study conducted by three well known patent movement think-tanks
(isi.fhg.de, pst.fhg.de, intellecprop.mpi.de), deeply engaged in the
legalisation of software patents, under order of the Ministery of
Economics (BMWi), whose proclaimed policy is that all inventions must be
protectable (see BMWi homepage) and that under this premise appropriate
solutions for "computer-implemented inventions" must be found, found out
that about 80% of the software companies and creators in Germany don't
want software patents and therefore need to be guided onto this path by
means of SME education campaigns such as the one conducted by the patent
experts of the Ministery of Education and Science (BMBF).  Also, the study
concludes that US law is bad and European law is good, but it
uncriticially equates "European law" with "EPO practise" and then goes on
to claim that the law is chaotic and needs to be written in order to
reflect EPO practise.  Also, the study doesn't seem to ask the question of
overall economic effect of one or the other possible rule of limiting
patentability, nor does it explore any possible delimiting rules.  Its
chief value seems to consist in the core part, the survey conducted among
several 100 software companies.  Although opinion polls, especially those
relating to corporate opinions, need to be viewed critically and with
greater care than done in this study, it is fair to say that in this case
the bias of the study was pro swpat and the results of the survey are anti
swpat.  The BMWi and the participants are to be commended for the courage
of publishing these results, and we will need to study them in more detail
in the next few days.  Some remarks can already be found under

        http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/papri/bmwi-fhgmpi01/

-- 
Hartmut Pilch                                         http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation      http://swpat.ffii.org/
95000 signatures against software patents       http://www.noepatents.org/