EU patent examiners to strike

international | consumer issues | other press Tuesday May 09, 2006 21:10 by R. Isible

Protesting pressure of exploding number of patents

Patent examiners in the EU are holding a one-day strike in Munich, Deutschland in order to protest their inability to handle an increasing flood of patent applications and the pressure being put on them to cursorily accept these patents.

Patents are increasingly used in ways that many argue are divergent from their original intent: to provide a period of protection and reward for inventors. Patents, it is argued, have come to be used as a method for companies to put each other out of business by using their finances to acquire questionable patents from a system that was not designed to cope with a huge volume of requests.

Further, patents are being applied for on subjects that are very close to algorithms (which are not supposed to be patentable), most notoriously in the case of Amazon's "one-click shopping cart".

Companies are also attempting to acquire hidden portfolios of patents on obscure methods (which are not easily researchable unless one has a vast amount of money to hire patent lawyers to examine the bulging databases). These patents are then used to take expensive court cases against rival businesses at sensitive times with the aim of driving down stock prices by causing investor unease.

In one of the most prominent cases, SCO Unix (a vendor of one of the traditional Unices), has taken court cases against a multiplicty of GNU/Linux developers and contributors including IBM.

In an attempt to fight back against this the Open Invention Network has created a pool of patents owned by companies like IBM, Sun, Novell, Red Hat, which will be used in counter-suits against any attack on one of the members contributing their patents to the pool. It is hoped that this move will protect the various GNU/Linux distributions against frivolous attacks by malign businesses and free up an environment for innovation and competition.

Open Innovation Network: http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/
EFF Patent Busting Project: http://www.eff.org/patent/
FSF Patent absurdity: http://www.fsf.org/news/patent-article.html
EU attempting to introduce software patents: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1911950,00.asp

Nature's article on the European Patent Office strike: