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

[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

[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

[captain_sweatpants]

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

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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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 ?