This is difficult to ask for since the TRIPS agreement requires that patents last 20 years.
Perhaps - in which case you play them at their own game. The 2-year software limitation clause would only affect software patents, which are disguised as non-software-patents. The patent itself would be valid for the full 20 years for non-software implementations.
Alternatively just exempt software-implementations from the get-go.
Another problem is that the start of a patents' term of validity is back-dated to when the application was made, IIRC. Because the EPO is so overloaded, application processing time is currently measured in years. So a 2-3 year duration might be completely unacceptable to the EPO since it would lead to patents that are expired-on-grant (we would have a hard time selling this idea to politicians). This should be fixed, but we might be, ah, spraying water against the wind if we try to fix the general the problems of the European patent system while trying to fix our specific problem.
On the other hand, they may welcome such a limitation on patents, since the patents would be less valuable, leading to a reduction of applications, thereby easing their workload. Then again, maybe the EPO has a different sense of logic to me.
And if the pharma lobby get worried that this idea will spread to other domains, we could gain new powerful enemies that we don't need.
-- Ciarán O'Riordan, +32 477 36 44 19, http://ciaran.compsoc.com/
Recent blog entries:
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