[Fsfe-ie] My comments on ENNs story of patents restart

[Justin Mason]

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Fergal Daly writes:
> On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 04:53:13PM +0000, Malcolm Tyrrell wrote:
> > I presume that these big companies will obtain patents in all territories
> > where patents are available, regardless of where the R&D is performed.
> > Unless they are threatening this merely as revenge (and I would think that
> > there responsibility to their own shareholders precludes this), there
> > would be no more or less reason to do R&D in Europe whether software
> > is patentable there or not. Am I wrong?
> 
> As far as I can see you're right and in fact this is a plus for Europe as
> labs in Europe would be free to use other people's patents during their
> research whereas in other regions they would have to license them before
> they could implement them, even for private use,

you know, that's a *very* good point!   

This is actually quite a big win for European R&D, too, since it would
mean they could develop a technique *similar* to a patented technique, as
long as the patented technique was only implemented on software inside
their European labs. ha!

- --j.
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