James Heald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Of the five focal areas to be discussed, one is directly IPRs; another > is "SMEs and entrepreneurship", which will also explicitly include a > look at the effects of patents.
"Vice-President Günter Verheugen, responsible for enterprise and industrial policy, said: “This Task Force should provide us with new ideas and coherent recommendations to promote the competitiveness of the Europe’s ICT industry." There's nothing responsible about the EC's activity in this area but it may well be viewed as coherent if this Task Force is just another attempt to get a 'balance' of self-serving testimony it can use to justify economically unjustifiable patent policy and practise: "The team of researchers at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands began their three-year study last December [2004], examining the legal, technical and economic effects of software patents on software innovation." "Ghosh said it seems odd that the Commission would ask for a report on whether software patent legislation is good or bad for innovation, and then not wait for the answer." http://xrl.us/m76v Seems they're still not prepared to wait and still not interested in rational and evidence based policy making. "...What it probably does mean is that the patent system, because of certain scientific and technological developments of the time, favors certain types of industry, such as chemical and electronic, and that this occasions both the accumulation of masses of patents and the intensive search for new patentable inventions in these industries. But even this explanation probably exaggerates the role of patent monopolies in industrial research. It seems very likely that even without any patents, past, present, or future, firms in these industries would carry on research, development, and innovation because the opportunities for the search for new processes and new products are so excellent in these fields that no firm could hope to maintain its position in the industry if it did not constantly strive to keep ahead of its competitors by developing and using new technologies... ...That experts in the chemical, electronic, and other industries testify that their firms could not maintain their research laboratories without patent protection may persuade some, but probably should be discounted as self-serving testimony." -- Fritz Machlup. Paul. _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
