Re: [Patents] US patent reform strategy inaugurated by myths & lies

[Sylvain Perchaud <sylvain@europe-shareware.org>]

Le dimanche 16 juin 2002 à 12:15, Gregory Aharonian a écrit:

>Sylvain cites:
>>- Bessen J. et Maskin E (2000), "Sequential Innovation, Patents, and
>>  Imitation", MIT
>
>Please stop citing this study.  It has no real world industry data in it.

Bessen & Maskin have built their economic model on real data (including
yours from Patnews), see pages 22 to 33 of their study.
Particularly  interesting are the econometric results of the Gort &
Klepper's article.

But data in themselves are useless, you have to draw sounding conclusions
from them and that's what did Bessen & Maskin.

And one conclusion is that sequentiality takes a very high part in the
innovation of the software publishers and so you've to take care not to
allow too strong exclusive rights (such as patents) on pieces of software.


>I haven't looked at the other studies, but I suspect they are as deficient
>of real world data as the Bessen study.

the Fraunhofer & Max Planck Institute study is the most empirical study I
ever saw concerning innovation in the software sector.
Knut Blind and his colleague have conducted a large survey among german
software publishers (Germany is the leading software market in Europe)
and their data shows for example that the re-use of existing code for a
new software is a very important phenomenon(see Schaubild 4.3.1 page 65) ;

or that the 3/4 of the software publishers (see Schaubild 3.2 page 50)
counts less that 50 employees (proving that software development isn't
costly, at least without the burden of patents).


>A more rational way to affect the effective length of patent data is
>to increase somewhat the maintenance fees of issued patents.

This can be a solution to correct a part of the negative effects of a
non-pertinent IPR.
The conclusion of this could be that we, as europeans, better wait
economical rationnality from the Patent Offices before embracing their
arguments.
As long as there's no economical proof we don't have any incentive to
allow software patents.


--
Sylvain Perchaud
http://www.europe-shareware.org