Re: [Patents] Re: Re: community patent

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

> But with ever-growing use of Digital Rights/Restrictions Management
> (DRM), I think that it's quite likely that people will try to patent DRM
> techniques.

Many of them are patented already.

> Art. 6 would allow in-house tools to be created (so long as they were
> not made publicly available), in order to unlock such files for
> decompilation, even if the DRM scrambling technique was patented.

Creation of inhouse tools is permitted by patent law anyway.
So I can't see how Art 6 of CEC/McCarthy does anything at all.

> > If it wasn't for Art 6, lawcourts could construct such a right from
> > constitutional principles or by analogy with copyright.  This is what CEC
> > and even more so Arlene McCarthy and Graham Taylor want to prevent.
>
> Hmmm.  I think this is unlikely.

It may require some fighting before courts, of course, and IANAL, don't
know which courts to try and how much it would cost.

It could be inferred from the copyright directive, from competition law
and from the construction of the patent system itself, which has various
enforcement exemptions designed to stimulate competition and avoid the use
of patent rights for anti-competitive purposes.

With Art 6, all this is no longer possible.  Art 6 makes it clear that
swpat are intended by the legislator to be used for anti-competitive
purposes such as prohibiting others from interoperating.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
145,000 votes 400 firms against software patents     http://noepatents.org/