Re: [Patents] EU Commission: Competitive and efficient European enterprises

[Carsten Svaneborg <svanebor@mpip-mainz.mpg.de>]

On Wednesday 09 April 2003 17:13, Simo Sorce wrote:
> They said the same when people dreamed of flying some century ago.

And also there was patents a problem.

There is good reason to believe that the Wright patent significantly
held back the pace of aircraft development in the United States by
absorbing the energies and diverting the efforts of people like Curtiss.
The aircraft case is similar to that of automobiles in that the problems
caused by the initial pioneer patent were compounded as improvements
and complementary patents, owned by different companies, came
into existence. The situation was so serious that at the insistence of
the Secretary of the Navy, during World War I, an arrangement was
worked out to enable automatic cross licensing. n221 This arrangement,
like the licensing of automobile patents, turned out to be a durable
institution. By the end of World War I there were so many patents on
different aircraft features that a company had to negotiate a large
number of licenses to produce a state-of-the-art plane.

Source for citation:
"On the complex economics of patent scope",
R.P. Merges and R.R. Nelson, Columbia Law Review, May 1990
http://sp.uconn.edu/~langlois/E382/Scope.html

(towards the end.)

-- 
  Mvh. Carsten