small companies in swpat court cases

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> Do you know any european court case involving software only patent
> claims where at least one of the party could be considered as "small"?
> (small company, individual, teacher or academic institution). I've
> never seen any reference to such a case, any pointer anyone?

I haven't either, but wouldn't be surprised if it did exist.
In general it is however the big companies whose patent departments are
willing to fight to the highest court in order to push for a "development
of jurisdiction".  Arno Koerber from Siemens said in a speech

        http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/papri/boch97-koerber/

that his department had made significant contributions to the "development
of jurisdiction" way from the traditional "restrictive" attitude of the
patent offices to a more modern and liberal one.  He was apparently
referring to cases like "Chinesische Schriftzeichen", where Siemens failed
in 1992 but at least obtained a uniform howling in its favor from all the
patent lawyers who wrote articles in GRUR against the BGH's "core theory",
which from then on carried the connotation of "restrictive", "flawed" etc
with it, as soon as anybody in GRUR mentioned it.  Even BGH judges
speaking in that forum had to capture the benevolence of the audience by a
deprecating reference to the "old core theory" from then on, although this
"theory" is nothing more than the common sense that the invention and not
the claim language (the core and not the linguistic clothing) must have
technical features.

A normal small company would have shyed the effort to litigate for
(patent-inflationist) principles. Small software companies will usually be
strictly oriented toward their private interest, and are thus easily
bullied by patent holders into out-of-court settlements and unable to have
any political influence.  That we got so many official support statements
from them for the petition is a miracle, it wouldn't have been possible
without the freesw/opensource culture.  Normally, any small company would
keep its mouth shut, if not as a matter of habit then because they have
IBM and other big patent owners among their customers.

On the other hand, small patent extortion companies fear noone.  They
could be willing to engange in prolonged court battles for the advancement
of their (patent-inflationist) principles.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch                                          http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
100,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/