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#title: Information Economy and Swpat Conference Paris 20020610-1

#descr: Institut Français des Relations Internationales (IFRI.org) and Center
of Information Policy Research at Mariland University (CIP.umd.org)
are organising a transatlantic conference on information economy and
in particular on the limits of patentability as well as the problems
in neighboring areas such as database exclusion rights and copyright. 
Hartmut Pilch is participating on behalf of FFII and Eurolinux on two
of the panels.

#TCe: The Conference

#Plp: Priorities according to Hartmut Pilch

#Rru: Relevant Work, Background Documents

#Ist: Institut Français des Relations Internationales (IFRI.org) and Center
of Information Policy Research at Mariland University (CIP.umd.org)
co-organised in June 2002/06 a transatlantic conference on information
economy and in particular on the limits of patentability as well as
the problems in neighboring areas such as database exclusion rights
and copyright.

#Pdn: Papers presented by the participants at a seminar held in Paris in
June 2002, among them many economists and social scientists from the
US.

#Lvn: Links to documents in the WWW which are related to patents on
immaterial innovation (rules of organisation and calculation, software
& business methods) and to the European Commission's recent push to
sanction such patents by a directive.

#Sle: Schedule of the talks planned for the IFRI conference.

#Tsi: This paper was %(q:opensourced) by us shortly before the conference
and published by the authors, who attended the conference, a few days
later.

#Aoa: Any discussion should be conducted on the basis of example patents, as
outlined in the %(ts:Software Patentability Legislation Testsuite)
approach.

#Tdk: The causality between law and various economic effects is an indirect
one:  the legal system produces patents, and the patents produce the
effects.  The example patents are an intermediate link in the
causality chain which people investigate, and this link is often
missing from the investigation.

#Tcp: The European Commission's Directive Proposal displays a few formulas,
such as the %(q:requirement of a technical contribution in the
inventive step), which suggest that a limitation on patentability is
intended.  Upon close reading, it however turns out that this proposal
legalises all types of patents which are generally deemed undesirable
and removes all limits on patentablity by 4-5 layers of safeguards,
designed to ensure that patentability can in no way be limited and
that lawcourts can no longer find any support in the law for refusing
even the most undesirable kinds of patents on rules of organisation
and calculation (information innovation, business methods).

#Sue: Studies such as that of Fraunhofer/ISI have not made it clear which
patents, granted according to which patentability rules, they are
talking about and yet investigated industry opinion about such patents
/ patentability rules.  Such a flaw can seriously reduce the value of
a study.  Several recent government-ordered studies from Europe seem
to suffer from this flaw.

#Erh: Even some of the best studies from american academia don't make it
very clear which sets of patents, granted according to which rules,
they are investigating.  The distinction between %(q:industries) or
%(q:fields of technology) is not very sharp.  A sharper delimitation
is possible and should be attempted.

#IdW: In particular, the concept of %(q:technical invention), as employed by
German courts and legal literature throughout the 70s and 80s (and
partially until today), is founded in non-legal categories that are
successfully used in the philosophy of science and serve to define
sharp boundaries.  I would like to recommend its use to economic
researchers, particularly from the USA, where this concept was not as
well established and has been forgotten for a longer time.

#Sto: Some other ideas which I may like to propose to the conference are
found in the %(q:background documents).

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