Alcatel: Patents creating Legal Insecurity and diverting Innovation Efforts

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

The following quote from an Alcatel report of 2002, filed to the
 Securities and Exchange Commission of the USA, may be of interest:

http://www.alcatel.com/finance/reports/2001/20-f/20f.pdf

  Like other companies operating in the telecommunications industry, we
  experience frequent litigation regarding patent and other intellectual
  property rights. Third parties have asserted, and in the future may
  assert, claims against us alleging that we infringe their intellectual
  property rights. Defending these claims may be expensive and divert
  the efforts of our management and technical personnel. If we do not
  succeed in defending these claims, we could be required to expend
  significant resources to develop non-infringing technology or to
  obtain licenses to the technology that is the subject of the
  litigation. In addition, third parties may attempt to appropriate the
  confidential information and proprietary technologies and processes
  used in our business, which we may be unable to prevent.

  Our business and results of operations will be harmed if we are unable
  to acquire licenses for third party technologies on reasonable terms.

  We remain dependent in part on third party license agreements which
  enable us to use third party technology to develop or produce our
  products. However, we cannot be certain that any such licenses will be
  available to us on commercially reasonably terms, if at all.

More info on Alcatel's patent-related activities are being collected at

        http://swpat.ffii.org/players/alcatel/

I would be grateful for any more detailed hints that help explaining
the patent situation at Alcatel.

The statement in this report sounds very similar to the statement of
Robert Barr at the FTC hearings this year.  Certainly this statement
will, like Barr's statement, appear in our list of quotations at

        http://swpat.ffii.org/archive/quotes/

Note that Arlene McCarthy is basing her software patentability
directive proposal on assertions about how badly Alcatel needs
software patents (and of course how vital they are for SMEs etc).

A page on McCarthy's proposal has been started at

        http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/eubsa-swpat0202/amccarthy0302/

Again I am always grateful for anyone's input, preferrably written in
plain-text form.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608   
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
135,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/