Greg on Bournemouth symposium

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

Apparently the symposium in Bournemouth is conceived as a PR exercise in
favor of some popular errors about patents and copyrights, such as those
which are also being espoused by the new Europarl-ordered study, namely:
 - copyright is not for software,
 - patents are for all ideas,
 - the EPO's practise proves that patentability cannot be limited and that the
   traditional "technical invention" concept doesn't work
 - yet something must be done in order to improve "patent quality"

The speakers have apparently been carefully chosen toward this aim.

Greg reiterates his misunderstandings, according to which software
developpers are unwilling to acknowledge that some hardware areas show
innovation patterns that are similar to software.

More about this symposium can be found at

        http://www.cippm.org.uk/html/symposium2002.html

--------------------------------------------------

    --  PATNEWS AT UNIV. BOURNEMOUTH SYMPOSIUM ON SOFTWARE IP - JULY 9TH

On Tuesday, July 9th, the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and
Management in the School of Finance and Law at Bournemouth University,
is having a one day symposium "Software Related Inventions: Prospects
and Risks for European Companies".  The theme of the symposium is as
follows:

        Protecting software as literary works under copyright is
        conceptually incoherent.  It also has the undesirable
        consequence of granting in effect permanent restrictions
        on the use of software products.  We shall never see the
        source code of Windows.  By contrast the patent system is
        based on a trade-off between disclosure and protection.
        Why then treat software differently from other products
        of human ingenuity?

        Awarding patents to software related inventions appears
        theoretically plausible, but commercially problematic.
        In an industry advancing through incremental innovations,
        the deadweight costs of a patent system have been rejected
        by many independent software developers.  The European
        Patent Office has shirked the issue sheltering behind the
        myth of a "technical effect".  In practice, protecting
        software under the European Patent Convention has now
        become a matter of clever drafting.

        This symposium seeks to explore some of these issues in an
        informal setting, away from the lobby interests of the
        Proposed Directive of the European Commission.

You have to love that second paragraph, managing to insult independent
software developers (who refuse to concede that many other patenting
industries incrementally innovate, especially digital hardware), EPO
(and their myths), and patent lawyers (who are too busy drafting cleverly
as opposed to serious thinking to clean up ill-defined IP laws).  Here
is a list of the presentations:

        -  Drafting a technical effect
             Keith Beresford, Beresford & Company, London

        -  Settlements of software patent disputes: empirical indications
             Puay Tang, University of Sussex

        -  Predictability and risk in finance related patenting
             Ruth Soetendorp, Bournemouth University

        -  Software development, IP and IT security
             Robert Gehring, Technische Universitat Berlin

        -  EC proposal for a Directive on the patentability of
           computer related inventions
             Tim Frain, Nokia

        -  Software non-copyrightability and business method patentability
             Greg Aharonian, PATNEWS

These are all presentations in the morning.  In the afternoon there will
be an open session on topics such as EPC Article 52, software patentability
and litigation risks.  The symposium will be held in the Boardroom of
the Poole House on the Talbot Campus of Bournemouth University.

For more information and to register (it costs 15 pounds), contact Jane
Gwizdala at jgwizdala@bournemouth.ac.uk.

-- 
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/