France To Launch a National Patent Troll

zoobab writes "France is creating a state sponsored patent fund, FranceBrevets, which primary focus will be to sponsor, acquire and license patents in the ICT (read software patents) sector. The patent fund is at the initiative of the minister of Research, Valérie Pécresse, the Ministry of Industry, Energy and digital economy, Eric Besson. The primary target of the fund is to collect licenses on those patents, which is already seen in France as the biggest patent troll of the country. France is also supporting the European Unitary Patent, which is seen by many at the final attempt to validate software patents in Europe."

Comments

Godwin

[Hazel Bergeron]

You remember the Third Reich? Get rid of the racism and the sense of urgency, and you basically have the EU in a couple of decades. If I think of the number of freedoms I've lost both this and that side of the Pond since 1995, I wonder whether it's immoral to carry on being productive.

Re:Godwin

[FatdogHaiku]

Mr. Galt, is that you? I'm not a big "Randophile" but sometimes current events remind me of Atlas Shrugged.

Re:Godwin

[king neckbeard]

There's a certain point where sacrificing freedoms, privacy, and such is no longer worth the benefits sacrificing them makes. Worse yet, these huge losses of freedoms don't seem to work well in practice today. The PATRIOT Act hasn't made Americans safer to any real degree, and the staggering amounts of CCTV haven't been effective in stopping crime in the UK.

Re:Godwin

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah, I thought I might be the only one..
I remember reading Atlas Shrugged back in the '70s, thought it was right-wing crap (can I add, the next thing I read was the Illuminatus! trilogy)
Re-read it in the early '80s, still thought it was right-wing crap.
Re-read it in the '90s (mostly to give me a set of references to take the piss out of a Randiot I had the misfortune to deal with at the time), it worried me that some of it was starting to make sense. Still regarded is as mostly right-wing crap, but with valid points.

Re-read it a couple of times in the early '00s. Unfortunately, some parts of it almost exactly described my then current situation apropos my employer and my contributions to the 'system'. I'd hate to admit this, but it was a bit of a factor in me getting out of the field of employment I was engaged in.

The more I do look at the world, the more I think she was right, but with the wrong 'enemy' - she had an obvious bee in her bonnet regarding 'commies' which made her a bit blinkered.

Like the characters in the book, I'm currently employed doing something which (just) pays the bills, but it's not in my 'specialist' area of employment - that which I used to get paid silly money for doing (but which others were getting even sillier money for 'exploiting') which is now my 'hobby'. This wasn't a conscious decision, it was a couple of years later that I actually made the connection with the book.

(and no, I've not yet in the 30 odd years I've owned a copy of the book managed to get through Galt's diatribe...it's like all the damn songs in the LOTR trilogy, I promise myself the next time I'll really read through it, but t'other part of the brain which knows better always wins and I skip it/them - and I still maintain Atlas Shrugged is mostly right-wing crap.)

Re:Godwin

[Man On Pink Corner]

You're doing illegal things yourself, dumbass. Most likely before you got out of bed this morning. So did I, and everybody who's reading this thread.

Seriously. Depending on where you live, do you have any idea just how many local, state or province, and Federal or EU laws you're subject to?

Re:Godwin

[phantomfive]

Ayn Rand's philosophy is so annoying because it is partly correct, partly idiotic......on the one hand, yes, it's a good idea to take care of yourself and not be a 'leech' on society.......on the other hand, she was so opposed to charity to a ridiculous degree. Really, sometimes people are down, and you don't have to kick them. It won't destroy society if you help them out a bit.

Re:Godwin

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you are saying "talk the talk and walk the walk" is bunk? Sorry. If people want to tell me how to live MY life, then they need to put their money where their mouth is and show me first. Otherwise it is pretty obvious that they are trying to misdirect people into doing something not in their best interest.

Re:Godwin

[Keen Anthony]

So you're saying, aside from the genocide, the only reason the Nazis were bad was because the Allies won the war; thus, they won the right to tell the history of the war and the history of the Nazis?

The U.S. remained in the war because the U.S.'s war with Germany was a consequence of its war with Japan. You're incorrect about the propaganda machine's depiction of Nazis as monsters. The Nazis were depicted as we depict Star Wars' stormtroopers, yes -- as formidable, highly organized, threatening foes, but not as monsters. The U.S. and U.K. press didn't discuss genocide. In fact, most American soldiers fighting the war had no idea about the genocide of Jews until near the end of the European campaign. Much of the American press seemed to bury the stories as rumors. There's even been some accusations that American finance companies like Citicorp had deliberately worked to bury stories of Nazi atrocities.

In reality, the Nazis got a pretty fair shake for a number of years after the war.

Re:Godwin

[captain_sweatpants]

uh...I'm sorry that you lack an understanding of hypocrisy

Re:Godwin

[styrotech]

Why did the US remain in the war 'till the bitter end?

Presumably (with some urging from Churchill) to prevent the Soviets from carrying on across the rest of Europe, which would probably give the Allies an even bigger threat to face in the future.

The Soviets would then have all Europes resources, industry and Nazi scientists. Stalin was huge supporter of equal rights when it came to sending people off to the gulag. And the Soviets had a preexisting ideological reason to pick a fight with the US/UK that Hitler never had.

Finality

[Anonymous Coward]

France is also supporting the European Unitary Patent, which is seen by many at the final attempt to validate software patents in Europe.

Correction : this will only be the final attempt if it succeeds. Otherwise, stand by for many more.

Re:Finality

[pieterh]

Ironically, the French patent establishment largely launched the notion of 'intellectual property' in the late 18th century.

This has been a long, long fight between the patent lobby and the rest of society. The sad thing is no-one really represents society, today, except civil society groups. Government has long become a tool for big business to get laws it thinks it needs, and the big software business (often, US firms like MSFT) still believes (wrongly) that it needs software patents.

Patents will be the next 'bubble'.

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy to create in the thousands, being nothing more than a sheet of paper and can be sold for billions.
France is getting onboard early to dampen austerity measures from the last bubble.

Shrug?

[medcalf]

Well, given that we (in the US) currently have a government that thinks "Atlas Shrugged" is a great story about how to run a railroad, I suppose it will be a while before stuff like this gets sorted out. And it probably won't be pleasant.

Re:Shrug?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, given that we (in the US) currently have a government that thinks "Atlas Shrugged" is a great story about how to run a railroad

We should make it a test for anyone standing for office - if you think that Atlas Shrugged is great then you're banned.

Welcome to 1984

[Midnight Thunder]

Animal farm wants their president back. As a French national this makes me question my nationality. Between three strikes patents and this I wonder whether France truly got rid of the Nazis? Sad thing is there are so many other 'first world' nations that are also following this trend of returning to medevial times.

Re:Welcome to 1984

[Rising Ape]

Between three strikes patents and this I wonder whether France truly got rid of the Nazis?

Holy sense of proportion... I don't think anyone's biggest complaint about the Nazis was their attitude towards intellectual property.

Re:Welcome to 1984

[medcalf]

Of course not, but tyranny is tyranny, and tyrants act like tyrants. When you give them control, they grab for more. Europe and the US are both heading down this slope, which will have a bad end if not reversed.

Re:Welcome to 1984

[drinkypoo]

Nazism was a bus that some people got on and rode for all it was worth. Several interests in this country including William Davis (who was nailed to the wall for it) and Prescott Bush (who was permitted to keep a million dollars and use it to found an empire that culminated in the placement of a total idiot in the white house... so far) and let us not forget IBM made awfully big piles of money off ol' Adolf's attempt to exterminate every Jew but himself. Hell, a relative of mine watched a shot-down Zero sink into the ocean, and he could clearly see where the material was still stamped ALCOA.

The Third Reich's aspirations were aided by greedy men who knew precisely what they were doing (in the case of all of these examples.) I'd say there is a direct parallel to be drawn here, because at the ultimate extreme, strong IP law kills people when they are denied access to medication due to profit-related monopoly. You could argue that only patent law does this, but champions of IP law wish us to conflate the various pieces, and so I shall.

Don't politicians learn?

[Teun]

It really makes you wonder under what stone these politicians live.

The whole world witnesses the stagnation to software development caused by the incessant court battles about software patents in the USofA and then they want a similar system!

But then most of them are probably lawyers by trade so they see opportunities...

Lets hope other nations like the Germans can stop this nonsense taking hold in EU legislation.

Re:Don't politicians learn?

[El_Muerte_TDS]

I think it's more an issue of the deepness of pockets than the size of stones.

Re:Don't politicians learn?

[JAlexoi]

It's an issue of lining one's pockets at the expense of ordinary people. France laws are crazy, Loire valley castles are copyrighted. (See http://www.istockphoto.com/tutorial_copyright_list.php)

Software patents ?

[Cochonou]

As far as I know, software patents are not recognized in France.
See for instance here.

Not as bad as it sounds

[HuguesT]

Of course on Slashdot patents=bad ; and of course as well no one is going to read the Fine Article, particularly if it is in french. The google "translation" and the various interpretations in english people have put out are not helping. Nowhere in the article is it written that this institution will massively collect stupid patents for little money and sue companies like Microsoft.

First you have to admit that patents have at least on principle some validity. Someone has an idea for a commercial new product, describes it in a patent and get some limited protection. It is totally unfair of large company to read such patents and implement the idea at a lower cost without paying licenses.

The idea here is to allow small-to-medium companies to benefit from patents as well. While a small company can certainly file for patent, they do not have the resources to defend them in court or otherwise, so basically they are more or less moot, except as bargaining chips for acquisition. The French government puts out a lot of money (think NSF-like grants but also industrialization grants) and they are not seeing as many industrial success as hoped. One reason, they reason, is that small companies cannot defend their ideas against larger companies, both in Europe and overseas. Other nations have government-based patent protection. Do you think the CSIRO patents for 802.11a/g were trolling?

So this institution will help small-to-medium French companies defend their portfolio. The initial idea is no to collect patents but to propose services. Indeed they will put together defensible cases by polling patents in some cases, but the stated aim is to get licenses income for the companies, not for this new institution by itself. This is not the same as trolling I think.

Essentially the French government doesn't want to see its industrialization monies get wasted too much. What's bad about this ?

Re:Not as bad as it sounds

[devent]

"First you have to admit that patents have at least on principle some validity. Someone has an idea for a commercial new product, describes it in a patent and get some limited protection. It is totally unfair of large company to read such patents and implement the idea at a lower cost without paying licenses."

No that is not how patents are working. With patents (not the BS business or software patents) you have a working machine, not just an idea. I can come up with thousands of ideas every day, should I be able to patent them all? No, only if I build a machine I can patent it.

And that is the one big problem with software patents, it's a patent on an idea, that can be implemented in multiple ways. I can implement a otto-motor* in just one way and if I do it in any other way it's not a otto-motor anymore and I can apply a new patent. Did you ever saw any source code with a software patent? No, because it claims the idea of an algorithm that can be implemented in anything.

"So this institution will help small-to-medium French companies defend their portfolio. The initial idea is no to collect patents but to propose services. Indeed they will put together defensible cases by polling patents in some cases, but the stated aim is to get licenses income for the companies, not for this new institution by itself. This is not the same as trolling I think."

So first the government is creating a system in which the small business owner cannot defend their ideas and now they creating a government institution to protect the small business owner against that system (that they created)? Why they just don't admit that the current patent system is broken and fix it? What they are planning to do now is spending millions of tax money to protect small business owner from a broken system instead to fix the system.

"Essentially the French government doesn't want to see its industrialization monies get wasted too much. What's bad about this ?"

Just fix the broken patent system. Is is really so hard to see where the idiocy lies? This institution is just admitting that the current government have no power against the big cooperations and the word trade agreements.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrol_engine