New EU IP Law Deemed Harmful

JPMH writes "The Register is reporting on this alert from FFII about a new EU Directive on IP enforcement due to go to the Parliament legal affairs sub-committee on Monday, and full Plenary in two weeks time. The detailed text of the measure was only published on Tuesday. FFII says that without better defined safeguards the Directive will lead to a far more agressive, lawyer-driven legal environment for creative businesses. Having seen how similar legislation is used in the United States, FFII fears that it will provide the perfect means for agressive litigators holding dubious intellectual property rights to "pull a SCO" and use the powers of the Directive to seriously harass and damage small open-source projects and innovative businesses. FFII has a list of MEPs to contact here." The law has been described as a DMCA on steroids. We've reported on this before, but it bears repeating...

Comments

Re:GPL Patents?

[kfg]

I relize that Patents are different from Copyright in that patents must be defended to remain valid.. But does it prevent any $0 licence?

Patents do not necessarily need to be defended to remain valid. In fact the presumption is that they do not. It might even be fair to say that the way things are right now most patents aren't defended. They just sit in the vault until the time is right.

You'll find many of the morally offensive legal battles going on right now are over patents that sat latent for years before the holder decided to file a suit against someone with money.

However, a good many patents are also given a public license, a $0 grant of use. The idea is not only valid but widely used.

But, patents are not like copyright which simply exist from the moment of creation. Obtaining a patent is a legal process which is time consuming and costly. While it is practical for a rich corporation with a flock of its own patent attorneys to file patent claims by the wheelbarrow full, the independent inventor may not have the means to file a single patent, even on a very lucrative invention.

And then yes, holding a patent is pointless if you can't defend it. Obtaining a patent might only cost a few hundreds to thousands of dollars. Defending one against Sony or Microsoft might well cost millions.

It's a sticky wicket I'm afraid.

KFG

Re:GPL Patents?

[jizmonkey]

It's unlikely you'd get a U.S. patent for a few hundred dollars. The filing and maintenance fees alone even for a small entity can easily exceed a thousand dollars. That's assuming you write the entire patent application yourself. Unless the inventor has a lot of experience with patents he is quite likely to write a very narrow, useless patent. Patent attorneys start at about $200 an hour. Altogether the costs of obtaining a patent are measured in the tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the firm and the complexity of the invention.

On the other hand, defending a patent is not necessarily expensive, because most alleged infringers would rather settle than litigate. Litigation costs millions for the defendant as well as the plaintiff, and the infringer can have huge potential liability (otherwise, the patentee wouldn't have gone to trial), say tens of millions of dollars.

Re:International Solution

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

They haven't - that was multinational government, what this is is something quite different. This is getting other countries to agree to the rules the US wants, not getting the US to agree to a consensus.