RE: IT World Feature: Patently ridic ulous: What's Europe to do?

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> I have been in IP business in about a year and I would like to share with
> you what I figured out so far.

It would be interesting if you could cite some experiences from your
business in order to support these thoughts.  I am also in the fortunate
position of being able to get frequent insights into this area.

> Patents  provides means for  the technical inventions become known to public
> that otherwise would tried to be kept as trade secret and hidden. With the
> mandatory publication of  patents, competitors see each other's search areas
> and collaborate their work toward new technologies like DVD. There are at
> least 10 huge cooperation behind development and standardization of DVD.
> Perhaps they hate each other because of being competitors, but because of
> patents, their development activities gets connected.

Without patents, they usually also get connected.
This is so in the software area (with standardisation consortia
consisting of different companies very active long before patents played a
major role), but it is similar in other areas as well.
Patents are not the only way of creating revenue streams.
Also, patents don't prevent companies from being secretive.
They just disclose a part of what companies are doing.

> There are 1000s of
> patents owned by 10s of different companies made the technology evolve in to
> such products as DVD player. The end user pays one time may be $20 more in
> addition to cost of the DVD player for the royalties (like appreciation to
> technology/donation to creators)  that for the patents cost zillions of
> dollars to develop.

Such claims (one "technology" cost "zillions of usd to develop") must
be looked at carefully.  At least in the software area, algorithms don't
cost much to develop.  The expensive part isn't protected by patents.
To a lesser extent this is true elsewhere.
Economic studies have found that patents are one among many and
often a fairly unimportant tool for capturing revenues, see

        http://swpat.ffii.org/archive/impact.en.html

But patents attract a lot of attention, especially from patent experts.
People overlook the big picture.

> Now a days even better technologies like "blue-disk" has
> been developped which are financed by the collected royalties. And of course
> it  is also based on many patents.

> In my opinion civilizations which are adopted and respected IPR in early
> times, now have the leading technologies.

The ancient Greeks didn't have much "IPR", and countries like Switzerland
or Netherlands, which were late to adopt the patent system, don't seem
particularly backward.  Nor is the quick catch-up of some "tiger states"
spurred significantly by patents.

As a sidenote, imho one shouldn't subsume patents under "intellectual
property".  Ideas are blossoms on the tree of civilisation, not of
individual intellect, as one german economist in the 19th century put it.

It is in general of course conceivable that temporary monopolies on ideas
could have a beneficial effect.  And it is certainly more likely with
blue-laser disks and FeBR permanent magnets than with rules or
organisation and calculation.

> If there is a undiscovered clan hidden in some rainforest living the
> same exact way for generations after generations, they haven't
> discovered benefits of appreciating to IP yet. Other way of saying
> this is cultures which haven't respected to IP has very insignificant
> contribution toward making human life better on this planet.

Of course rainforest people don't have "IPR".
That doesn't mean that "IPR" got us out of the rainforest.

> Like anything else, even IP gets deteriorated in time because of some
>"system abusing" people. So the old patent and other IP regulations
> needed to be modernized to make it bullet proof and provide better
> life for every body not for a small group.

Indeed.
I described some processes of deterioration under

        http://swpat.ffii.org/analysis/inflation/

A reform of the patent system with the aim of making it really serve
progress, as you propose, could actually end up shaking it quite
thouroughly.  But if the "small group" continues to work toward
deterioration of the system, you will end up with a radical change of
opinion climate.  From today's naive belief of "the more property rights
the better" you will end up with beliefs such as "any slowdown of
distribution results in a slow-down of innovation", and those beliefs
may even be justified as simlpified expressions of a thinking whose time
has come.

-- 
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/