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News
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| European Union. The deadline of the PATQUAL
| survey on the quality of the European
| patent system has been extended to 15th May
| 2010
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http://www.ipr-helpdesk.org/news/news_6901.en.xml.html
Software patents: Stifling innovation with threats and bluster
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| Software patents and blackmail
|
| From a very practical perspective, it is
| next to impossible to determine whether a
| given piece of software violates patents. A
| typical program consists of dozens if not
| hundreds of ideas. Any of them could be
| patented. In practice, making sure youâre
| not infringing a patent simply takes too
| long, and is too expensive. So nobody does
| it.
|
| And I do mean nobody. Even the largest
| corporations canât stay clear of each
| othersâ software patents - over the past
| few months alone, we have seen lawsuits
| between Apple and HTC , Red Hat vs. IP
| Innovation LLC (now thatâs a name for a
| patent troll. Well, they went home with a
| ringing defeat. Congratulations to Michael
| Cunningham, Rob Tiller and the rest of the
| Red Hat legal team!), and the Apple vs
| Nokia sue-fest.
|
| But corporations sue other corporations
| only as a last resort. Jonathan Schwartz,
| Sunâs former CEO, illustrated quite
| pointedly how large corporations normally
| deal with this problem: They simply
| threaten each other with their different
| patents until both agree that itâs better
| to stay quiet.
|
| Bill Gates was quite right when he said in
| 1991:
|
| âIf people had understood how patents would
| be granted when most of todayâs ideas were
| invented and had taken out patents, the
| industry would be at a complete stand-still
| today. [...] A future start-up with no
| patents of its own will be forced to pay
| whatever price the giants choose to impose.
| That price might be high: Established
| companies have an interest in excluding
| future competitors.â
|
| [Internal Microsoft Memo (1991), quoted in
| Fred Warshofsky, The Patent Wars (1994)]
|
| For a company like IBM, Apple or Microsoft,
| patent lawsuits are a huge problem. For any
| organisation smaller than that, theyâre an
| existential threat.
|
| All this turns spreading fear, uncertainty
| and doubt about software patents into a
| marketing strategy. As Jobs has done, you
| simply have to say âwe know your stuff is
| infringing patents, but weâre not telling
| you which onesâ. This is a callous strategy
| to make your targetâs customers and users
| think they are under some sort of legal
| threat.
|
| Thereâs a word for that. Itâs called
| blackmail.
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http://blogs.fsfe.org/gerloff/?p=345
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