Re: USPTO to license proprietary e-mail alternative from EPO

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> It seems that you are embarking in a holy war against everything it's
> not GNU or Penguin-based.

You must have misunderstood everything.  See below.

> Having been one of the first lawyers to use Linux in their office in
> Italy (it was a red hat 3.2 distribution), I have always been fond of
> having a reliable, bottom-up alternative to Microsoft and Apple.
> Additionally, I like the idea that the Internet has produced something
> stabler and more powerful than most Redmond releases. As a member of
> the ADINCOM (http://www.adincom.it) board I am currently in the
> process of organizing a conference on software patentability, and my
> first thougt was having someone able to represent the open source
> viewpoint. In another occasion we invited Dr Stallmann to speak to the
> ADINCOM members. As a member of the Legal Advisory Board of the
> Information Society Directorate-General of the European Commission I
> expressed doubts on the first Commission position on software
> patentability precisely on that basis.

Sorry to say, the current position of the Commission on this subject is
completely idiotic even from a purely legal point of view.  A patent judge
here said that the current directive proposal is the "worst piece of
legislative work that has come from Brussels since the assault on the
German beer purity norms", and there are quite a few legal treatises about
the ridiculosity of this piece.  See as an example

        http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/eubsa-swpat0202/sedl0203/

Maybe you could do something to persuade the commission to withdraw this
proposal.

> That said, I find your position totally gratuitous. What I see here is
> a joint effort to reduce filing burdens worldwide and finally the
> admission that somebody in Europe can do things better than in the US.
> This is a commendable step out of the usual US-centric position in
> this area towards something that may be useful to anybody filing a
> patent application.

The EPO solution may be better than the USPTO solution, but it is still
bad.

> Frankly I don't give a damn if it's not gnu-based, as long as it
> works.

If it works only with a closed-source windows client and does nothing that
can't be done by simple and free internet solutions (such as mail, SOAP
etc), then it is not state of the art.

> Additionally, I don't like integralists and provocations, and having a
> good case is not an excuse.

??

> Finally, by European standards, the e-mail argument is ridiculous. Do
> you really think of sending a patent application in clear via e-mail?
> It would be malpractice and a violation of EU data protection
> directive, as far as personal data contained in the application are
> concerned.

Just add public-key cryptography, based on the openpgp standard and other
standards, with robust free implementations, financed by the german
government, available at

        http://www.gnupg.org/

ffii.org and many others are successfully handling confidential
submissions from members using public key cryptography and automatic mail
processing via procmail.

I wouldn't complain if the PTO used proprietary software to do some of
these things.  It is not important what the PTO uses internally but
what it forces upon its customers.  The PTO is a public monopoly, and
therefore it should use open standards state-of-the-art procedures
rather than spend lots of money just to poorly reinvent the wheel and lock
its customers into proprietary interfaces which people don't want to use
and for which programmers don't want to develop applications because such
interfaces have no future.

-- 
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/