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[News] Europe Looks for Feedback Regarding the Patent System; FSF Europe Denounces Software Patents

  • Subject: [News] Europe Looks for Feedback Regarding the Patent System; FSF Europe Denounces Software Patents
  • From: Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 06 May 2010 12:36:43 +0100
  • Followup-to: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • User-agent: KNode/4.4.2
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News

,----[ Quote ]
| European Union. The deadline of the PATQUAL 
| survey on the quality of the European 
| patent system has been extended to 15th May 
| 2010 
`----

http://www.ipr-helpdesk.org/news/news_6901.en.xml.html

Software patents: Stifling innovation with threats and bluster

,----[ Quote ]
| 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.
`----

http://blogs.fsfe.org/gerloff/?p=345
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