IBM's extortion rackets & Paris conference

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

See

        http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html
        http://swpat.ffii.org/players/ibm/

At the Paris conference Mr. Burt an IBM attorney from UK was present.  Mr
Burt contributed some well known patent mantras to the conference, such as
that the CEC did a good job of confirming what has been the law for the
last 20 years, and that this is in particular helpful for small companies.
He also said that on his advisor's seat in the Standing Advisory Committee
of the EPO (SACEPO), he was relentlessly pressing the EPO to improve
patent quality.

I didn't find any of these statements particularly worth contradicting.
Nor did anybody else.  Other lawyers such as Thierry Sueur (Monsieur
"L'industrie c'est moi" from Air Liquid, a chemical company that
apparently desperately needs software patents) and Tanugi-Xxx, one of the
"L'Academie de Technologie c'est moi" people, also made contributions of a
similar type.  The latter lied with an especially straight face and talked
about "pollution of the discussion by open source advocates", thus
provoking an enraged rebuttal by Bernard, who debunked some of the
internals of the Academie des Technologies "study" of last year.  In
general, the statements of the patent advocates were welcome as a kind
of spice as well as specimens in a conference that was largely talking
about the sociology and political economy of the patent movement.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
120,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/