[Fsfe-ie] Possible opinion formers: academics

Antoin O Lachtnain antoin at eire.com
Thu Dec 4 00:59:58 CET 2003


i can certainly give you some pointers on the Irish legal help side, if 
it's any help. I'm in Germany for the rest of the week, but let me know 
what help you'd need and we can go from there.

as for the theory and practice of patents, you should remember that just 
because a company has a lot of software patents doesn't mean that it 
necessarily thinks software patents are a brilliant idea.  Applying for 
patents is in some respects like paying taxes. It's something that you do 
because you know you have to, not because you like doing it. Companies pick 
them up to use them defensively (which is not a bad idea in a litigious 
patent-ridden world). Also, there may be tax benefits from having patents - 
in Ireland patent royalties are tax free, although this applies mainly to 
manufactured products, rather than software  -.

Antoin.

At 15:53 03/12/2003 -0800, Justin Mason wrote:
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>James Heald writes:
> >James Heald wrote:
> >
> >> If we're looking for a way into the technology transfer people at TCD, I
> >> wonder if Iona (http://www.iona.com/) might be onside.
> >>
> >> They specialise in systems integration based on Open Standards (Corba,
> >> J2EE etc) running on a variety of platforms including Linux -- so
> >> potentially directly threatened by software patents.
> >>
> >> According to the page at TCD,
> >> "Iona is a prestigious software company which was developed from
> >> research into distributed systems at Trinity in 1991. Dr Chris Horn, a
> >> former lecturer in the Department of Computer Science, serves as
> >> Managing Director. Iona was launched on NASDAQ in February 1997 and has
> >> over 500 employees worldwide".
> >>
> >
> >Though their PR material does make quite a lot of the fact that their
> >core system is built on patented "Adaptive Runtime Techology"(tm)
>
>I used to work for Iona -- they were very keen on software patents, at
>least at one stage.  If I recall correctly, the board was keen on
>establishing a patent portfolio, since that's viewed as a Good Thing by
>investors and shareholders.  So it would be unlikely, I'd say.
>
>However, totally unrelated -- it occurs to me that Antoin O'Lachtnain,
>being a frequenter of the IRISHLAW list, might have a good idea of some
>people in the Irish legal community who might be useful to get in contact
>with.
>
>Would that be useful?
>
>(Antoin: this is regarding software patents, and ways to get the correct
>viewpoint ;) "out there" into the other decision-making communities.)
>
>- --j.
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Antoin O Lachtnain
antoin at eire.com



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