Re: [Patents] Patents meeting - Cambridge (UK), 8pm, tonight

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

> There were 3 speakers Philip Martin of patent & trademark law firm Marks
> and Clerk (http://www.marks-clerk.com/), explaining the current legal
> situation in some detail, tho' from an IP lawyer's point of view.

In such cases you need to be able to explain that the "current legal
situation" is more complex than what a few authorities whom a lawyer
choses to cite have decreed.  E.g. the EPO itself and even more so
national courts have developped quite a variety of possible (and
impossible) viewpoints.  And it is not justified to conclude from this
variety that the law is unclear.  The variety may well be due to other
reasons, such as "pressure from the industry" on the EPO in 1985, as
barrister Matthew Lee found in his analysis of 1994 (quoted in
http://swpat.ffii.org/analysis/invention/).

We quote some of the variants of the "current law" on the agenda for
tomorrow's meeting in the EP, see

        http://swpat.ffii.org/events/2003/europarl/06/17/

I can see no reason why the EPO's decision of 1984, that a claim to a
document processing system consisting of generig computing hardware plus
calculation rules is a claim to a program for computers as such, should
now be outdated or that the German Federal Patent Court is wrong and
certain more recent buch much less clear caselaw from the EPO's Technical
Boards of Appeal should be called "the current law".

We warmly welcome you to come to tomorrow's meeting.  It looks very
promising and we need more people to come.

> When I slightly mischievously asked whether he thought that the
> interests of the "economic majority" should be equated with the general
> public, he said that that was outside his area of expertise...

Did he use the term "economic majority" ?

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-18979927
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
145,000 votes 400 firms against software patents     http://noepatents.org/