From phm@A2E.DE Sat Jul 08 13:25:02 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 4934 invoked from network); 8 Jul 2000 20:25:02 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m2.onelist.org with QMQP; 8 Jul 2000 20:25:02 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO wtao97.oas.a2e.de) (62.154.243.66) by mta1 with SMTP; 8 Jul 2000 20:25:01 -0000 Received: from localhost by wtao97.oas.a2e.de via sendmail with esmtp id for ; Sat, 8 Jul 2000 20:21:59 +0200 (CEST) (Smail-3.2 1996-Jul-4 #1 built 2000-Mar-31) Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2000 20:21:59 +0200 (CEST) X-Sender: phm@wtao97.oas.a2e.de To: Lojban List Subject: Re: Petition for a Software Patent Free Europe (fwd) Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: PILCH Hartmut It is time to bring Lojban into the European patent reform discussion, as I am doing below. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2000 20:13:16 +0200 (CEST) From: PILCH Hartmut To: Subject: Re: Petition for a Software Patent Free Europe > Our opposition to software patents was restated in Parliament on > Wednesday 6 July Great. We would be very interested in detailed updates. Meanwhile, the press reported rumors that the European Comission was softening its stance on software patentability, but we found these rumors to be completely unfounded, probably part of a disinformation campaign from the DG Internal Market. We asked the EC for clarification: http://petition.eurolinux.org/pr/pr3.html Moreover, the FFII is also directing more criticism to the Community Patent plans, demanding that patent inflation be brought under control before the system is further centralised: http://swpat.ffii.org/xatra/egp27de.html (german-language draft only so far) The idea is to put in some institutional checks and balances and to repair the incentive system in such a way that the patent bureaucracy becomes less corrupt (please read http://www.bustpatents.com/corrupt.htm) and more interested in quality, e.g. (1) patent offices no longer receive money for granting patents. Patent fees are abolished. (2) novelty check: patent office no longer conduct patent examination themselves. Instead this is given into the hands of certified companies, who are held liable later if they have not found all prior art (similar to the liability of financial audit companies) (3) inventivity check: after the novelty check, the "goal of the invention" and the "prior art" is published, and anybody who submits the same solution within 6 months becomes co-patent-owner. If there are more than 3 such co-patent-owners, the invention is deemed not inventive enough and rejected. (4) translation requirements should not be sacrificed as light-heartedly as the EC is proposing. Offering patent owners "good value for little money" isn't everything. The patent system has some public-interest purposes such as (a) telling everybody (not only patent specialists who are fluent in English or other patent languages) what they are allowed to do (b) popularising advanced technological knowledge (e.g. knowledge about real inventions, selected by rigid procedures as above suggested, not masses of cheap trivial patents) (c) cultivating technical terminology in multiple languages. Translation can be made cheap by using a logical language (www.lojban.org) which allows reliable automatic translation into many languages. It is contradictory to abolish translation requirements at a time when other directorates of the EU are investing a lot of money in making a "multilingual information society" viable. We have some more ideas of this kind that could significantly improve the quality of the system. They all boil down to the slogan "Less is more". It is now time to raise the issue of patent quality. M. Noteboom (DG 15) told Eurolinux that currently the EU is putting a system in place that should be good enough to serve for the next 20 years. Now is the time to make sure this is the case, and I think this requires a huge effort. Thank you. -phm _______________________________________________ Presse - Presseverteiler des FFII Presse@ffii.org http://ffii.org/mailman/listinfo/presse