Panel I 14:00-15:00

Recent Developments in Granting and Use of ICT Patents

Recordings

Participants (in order of speaking)

Jean-Paul Smets (CEO & patent owner, nexedi.com, FR)
Adrian Lozano (patent data mining expert, SE)
Jozéf Halbersztadt (patent expert of Internet Society Poland)
Bernd Herd (Herdsoft.com, DE) - Recording at MP3 - English or MP3 - German
Burak Canboy (CEO, win.rar GmbH, DE)
Joerg Wittenberger (SME in artificial intelligence, DE) and Roland Orre (CEO & patent owner, Neurologic.se)

Chair

Olga Zrihen MEP (Socialist Group, Belgium)

Summaries of contributions

Jozéf Halbersztadt contribution (English) I will show two highly topical patent cases where different interpretations of international treaties are clearly exposed. From analysing the claims, we can make plausible conjectures about which types of patents will be granted and enforced in various jurisdictions.
Adrian Lozano contribution (English) I will present a prototype of a database that contains approximately 20.000 granted european software patents. The database is designed to increase accessibility and facilitate classification of software patents. The system will use Bayesian filtering and wiki-like tagging to achieve that goal. Possible
extentions are correlations with other data, like R&D intensity and company size and an interactive interface similar to mail client spam filters.
Bernd Herd contribution (German) English translation I will focus on real world experience of commercial software development from a SME perspective in the present minefield of EPO granted patents. Hands-on experiences with patent mines in e.g. the fields of geographical data analysis, data compression, and full text indexing illustrate the risks and deadlocks by real-world licensing practices as well as granting practices. The examples serve to illustrate the necessity of legal security and patent law clarity (like Parliament article 6a) and show the many ways in which patents cause extra costs to software developers.
Burak Canboy I am CEO of a shareware company specialized in compression software. We are market leaders in Europe and have 2 million downloads per month and growing. Our busines model is successfully built on copyright and beeing ahead of competitors. A serious problem is that small parts of programs are patented. Future companies might end up in a situation where they don't know which parts. You might then recieve letters from companies wanting money for licencing things you wrote yourself.
Roland Orre and Joerg Wittenberger (merged contributions) To a computer scientist data processing lies very close to the concept of the Turing machine. To us the Parliament article 3a:
- "3a. Member states shall ensure that data processing is not considered to be a field of technology in the sense of patent law, and that innovations in the field of data processing are not considered to be inventions in the sense of patent law."
is similar to a set of Turing compatible processes being excluded from patentability. Taking non-patentability of Turing processes for granted, an AI approach to software solutions, business models and marketing/manufacturing processes may give new insights. Remebering historical more or less successfull attempts to exhaust spheres of patentable subject matter from patent claims, like "public patents pools" and "defensive publication" (also called "patent profylax"), we hope our proposal will open a new way to use the patent system as to make the patent system achieve it's goals: to stimulate the shaping of standards in design and knowledge representation and stimulate cooperation between researchers and companies. Maybe this "workaround" will not be necessary in Europe, but the US need is obvious.
Jean-Paul Smets contribution (English)
- Nexedi Position on Software Patents.

Questions

How many patents of which types have been granted and enforced in various jurisdictions?
How have ICT businesses been affected?
Patent enforcement practicies?
Focus on real experience with patents.

Order and proposed time slots:

Jean-Paul Smets 7.5 Jozéf Halbersztadt 10 Adrian Lozano 7.5 Bernd Herd 10
Roland & Joerg 10 Burak Canboy 5
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  - 50 min