[Patents] Eurolinux position on Community Patent

[xdrudis@tinet.org (Xavi Drudis Ferran)]

El Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 07:58:02PM +0100, PILCH Hartmut deia:
>                  Eurolinux Position on the Community Patent
>
I think it is a very good proposal, but there are some points I don't 
understand:

> Solution to the multilinguality dilemma
> 
>    While the burden of having to provide translation for 22 languages may
>    be formidable, requiring all Europeans to be fluent in English or any
>    specific set of official languages just transfers the same burden from
>    patentees to citizens and runs counter to the EU's professed
>    committment to cultural diversity.
>
I completely agree (well, except that I have never counted the number 
of languages in the EU, I did't know they were 22, 
but it will change with time, and maybe the exact
number is not very important). 

>    Machine translations could be accepted, if they reach a certain level
>    of reliability. By using intermediate languages such as UNL or Lojban
>    (Logical Language), a patent applicant can create an unambiguous
>    semantic representation that can be reliably machine-translated into
>    any number of languages. Such a semantic representation could moreover
>    prove helpful in disambiguating claims and descriptons during patent
>    litigation.
>
If that is technically feasible, it would be a great advance if it 
was possible, both for law and NLP.
 
>    Another approach would be to stipulate that a Community Patent is
>    potentially valid in all countries but can be enforced in each country
>    only after a translation in that country's language has been
>    published. Also, the claims are more important than the description.
>
There's something I don't quite understand with this idea:
- what does potentially valid mean?. Would it be similar to the priority 
date, that now allows patentees (for a while) to patent something in one 
country when 
it is no longer novel because they patented it in another country 
when it was novel?. So, they would get their patent in those countries 
where they have a translation of the patent and simply a sort of 
unlimited "license" to patent in those others when they translate it 
to those languages?. That does not seem much better for the rest of 
us than granting patents in (say) English, because unless we 
learn English we wouldn't be able to know that somebody is waiting 
for us to compete in their market to translate the patent and sue us.  

- How does it relate to the automatic 
granting and patent insurance company market previously proposed?. If 
patents are granted without warranty of novelness, etc. and those 
warranties are left to a betting game, how does language enter in that 
game?. 

- How fair is it to grant any privilege over the freedom of people 
to somebody in exchange of disclosure of anything if that disclosure 
is not in a language those people understand, and therefore does not 
really teach them much?. Of course it allows people to translate it,
to incorporate it into textbooks that are then translated, etc. and this 
could allow those that don't speak the patent language to learn it 
indirectly. So it 
isn't a complete disclosure but also it is better than nothing. It 
makes sense that the privilege granted over the freedom of those 
who don't speak that language is weaker than the privilege over freedoms 
of those who do.
   
- How do we define countries?. The mapping between language and 
territory is not as simple as one state one language. 


-- 
Xavi Drudis Ferran
xdrudis@tinet.org