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

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

On Wednesday 09 April 2003 17:58, Gregory Aharonian wrote:
> Such companies designing electronic circuits then sell or license
> the VHDL or Verilog or SystemC codes, but like software people.
> And they protect their designs with patents.

Just to satisfy my idle curiosity. Who can infringe on a design?

Other companies manifacturing/selling devices with physical
chips using same design, or other companies who make similar
designs?

To clarify the question. Lets say a articture company gets a
patent on a design of a building. Is it construction company building
similar buildings or a competing architect who infringe on the
patent?

Because clearly buildings are "practical and usefull". The designs/
blueprints can not even be used as toiletpaper. But talking about
software makes it is easy to confuse the two.


> Other fields such as biotech and pharma have similar pathways
> for SMEs to do R&D and build a business.  And with a good
> idea, you can raise the funding where the costs might be higher
> than for other fields.

It is true that SME also can mitigate infringement risks by not
marketing products, but acting as sub-contractors or 
component manifacturers for companies with the patent
portfolios necessary to market innovations with a minimum of
infringement risk.

However, it is highly likely that such an reorganisation is suboptimal
from an economic perspective, because it is induced by minimizing
patent infringement risk, rather than profit maximization in a free
marketplace.

Furthermore, it is clear that companies like Microsoft would be the
gatekeeper controlling all the marketed software innovations, and
thus it would only go to further existing monopolies, and the dead-weigh
losses associated therewith, secondly disruptive innovative
technologies would never reach the customers.


Some economic background:

"Combining Patented Inventions in Multi-invention Products:
Transactional challenges and Organizational Choices",
D. Somaya and D. J. Teece August 2001
http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/lbpp/dsomaya/Papers/DSDT01.pdf

-- 
  Mvh. Carsten