Re: [Patents] Indian patent practice

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

> One of the argument for the directive that has been mentioned in Denmark
> is that patent protection is necessary otherwise jobs will just move to 
> India.

> Clearly a bogus statement, but anyways, I checked the software patent
> status in India, and the Indian patentpractice guidelines (of 2001) are
> available at:  http://www.patentoffice.nic.in/ipr/patent/manual.htm

Very interesting, but unrelated to the bogus statement (McCarthy "low cost
economy" recital).  According to this bogus logic, it is quite normal that
"low cost" places like India should grant few patents whereas high cost
places should grant many.

But, evidently, jobs, even those in R&D, are not moving to where the many
patents are.

Andy Grove of Intel in his BSA presentation

  Andy Grove presentation: US IT industry decline, rising litigation costs
  http://www.globaltechsummit.net/press/AndyGrove.pdf

points to the cheap production cost and good infrastructure in terms of
non-rival goods (e.g. basic research, university education) and to the
high litigation costs imposed by patent inflation in the US, and says that
all these together are causing a rapid exodus of IT jobs to India et al.

Unfortunately Grove stops short of calling for a cheap and effective (but
politically risky) cure to the problem: a return to the concept of
technical invention, as envisaged by the EP.  Instead he calls for
"strengthening the patent office", i.e. more public spending on prior art
search.  He seems to estimate this at 1 bn USD p.a., although it is not
clear to me fromthe presentation whether this yearly 1 bn is solely for
"strengthening the patent office".

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-18979927
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
290,000 votes 2000 firms against software patents    http://noepatents.org/