UK court decision about swpat infringement

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

Under

http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bailii/disp.pl/ew/cases/EWHC/Patents/2002/397.html

you find a decision of the UK High Court, according to which a game played
between a foreign server and UK clients would still infringe on a UK (EP)
patent for a computer-implemented game system, if that patent is valid and
the game falls within the claims.  The fact that the server is placed
outside of the territory, so that the system as claimed does not
physically occur within the UK jurisdiction, does not protect the
defendant from liability.

The judge adopts a somewhat unbalanced teleological (purpose-oriented)
law interpretation, according to which it is the purpose of patent law to
protect the inventor and claim-wordplays, which are commonplace and even
the basis of software patentability in Europe, may be played by the
patentee but not by those who try to try to dodge him.

It is also unfortunate that the defendant did not fight on the basis that
he was using only a game and program as such, with no extra inventive
element, and that therefore, even if the patent could be valid, he could
not have been infringing on it, since the invention, according to art 52
EPC, must have been somewhere outside of what he had been using.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
100,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/